Unicode Character Sets | macroman | Mac West European | macroman_general_ci | 1 | | sjis | Shift-JIS Japanese | sjis_japanese_ci | 2 | | swe7 | 7bit Swedish | swe7_swedish_ci | 1 | | tis620 | TIS620 Thai | tis620_thai_ci | 1 | | ucs2 | UCS-2 Unicode | ucs2_general_ci | 2 | | ujis | EUC-JP Japanese | ujis_japanese_ci | 3 | | utf16 | UTF-16 Unicode | utf16_general_ci | 4 | | utf16le | UTF-16LE Unicode | utf16le_general_ci | 4 | | utf32 | UTF-32 Unicode | utf32_general_ci | 4 | | utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 | | utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci | 4 | +----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+ In cases where a character set has multiple collations, it might not be clear which collation is most suitable for a given application. To avoid choosing the wrong collation, it can be helpful to perform some comparisons with representative data values to make sure that a given collation sorts values the way you expect. This section describes the collations available for Unicode character sets and their differentiating properties. For general information about Unicode, see Section 10.9, “Unicode Support” . MySQL supports multiple Unicode character sets: 10.10.1 Unicode Character Sets • utf8mb4 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character. • utf8mb3 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to three bytes per character. • utf8 : An alias for  utf8mb3 . • ucs2 : The UCS-2 encoding of the Unicode character set using two bytes per character. • utf16 : The UTF-16 encoding for the Unicode character set using two or four bytes per character. Like ucs2  but with an extension for supplementary characters. • utf16le : The UTF-16LE encoding for the Unicode character set. Like  utf16  but little-endian rather than big-endian. • utf32 : The UTF-32 encoding for the Unicode character set using four bytes per character. Note The  utf8mb3  character set is deprecated and you should expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use  utf8mb4  instead. Although  utf8  is currently an alias for  utf8mb3 , at some point  utf8  is expected to become a reference to  utf8mb4 . To avoid ambiguity about the meaning of  utf8 , consider specifying  utf8mb4  explicitly for character set references instead of  utf8 . utf8mb4 ,  utf16 ,  utf16le , and  utf32  support Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) characters and supplementary characters that lie outside the BMP.  utf8  and  ucs2  support only BMP characters. Most Unicode character sets have a general collation (indicated by  _general  in the name or by the absence of a language specifier), a binary collation (indicated by  _bin  in the name), and several language-specific collations (indicated by language specifiers). For example, for utf8mb4 ,  utf8mb4_general_ci  and  utf8mb4_bin  are its general and binary collations, and utf8mb4_danish_ci  is one of its language-specific collations. Most character sets have a single binary collation.  utf8mb4  is an exception that has two:  utf8mb4_bin and (as of MySQL 8.0.17)  utf8mb4_0900_bin . These two binary collations have the same sort order but 1970