The National Character Set SELECT ’Müller’ COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci; SELECT _binary’Müller’; •A nonbinary string with the connection default character set and  utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci  collation (fails if the connection character set is not  utf8mb4 ): •A string with the connection default character set and collation: Standard SQL defines  NCHAR  or  NATIONAL CHAR  as a way to indicate that a  CHAR  column should use some predefined character set. MySQL uses  utf8  as this predefined character set. For example, these data type declarations are equivalent: Here,  character_set_connection  is  sjis , a character set in which the sequence of  à  followed by \  (hexadecimal values  05  and  5C ) is a valid multibyte character. Hence, the first two bytes of the string are interpreted as a single  sjis  character, and the  \  is not interpreted as an escape character. The following  n  (hexadecimal value  6E ) is not interpreted as part of an escape sequence. This is true even for the second string; the  _latin1  introducer does not affect escape processing. CHAR(10) CHARACTER SET utf8 1939 10.3.7 The National Character Set mysql>  SET NAMES sjis; mysql>  SELECT HEX(’à
’), HEX(_latin1’à
’); +------------+-------------------+ | HEX(’à
’) | HEX(_latin1’à
’) | +------------+-------------------+ | E05C6E | E05C6E | +------------+-------------------+ mysql>  SET NAMES latin1; mysql>  SELECT HEX(’à
’), HEX(_sjis’à
’); +------------+-----------------+ | HEX(’à
’) | HEX(_sjis’à
’) | +------------+-----------------+ | E00A | E00A | +------------+-----------------+ Example 2: Here,  à  (hexadecimal value  E0 ) is followed by  , the escape sequence for newline. The escape sequence is interpreted using the  character_set_connection  value of  latin1  to produce a literal newline (hexadecimal value  0A ). This happens even for the second string. That is, the  _sjis  introducer does not affect the parser’s escape processing. Example 1: The following examples show that escape processing occurs using  character_set_connection even in the presence of an introducer. The examples use  SET NAMES  (which changes character_set_connection , as discussed in Section 10.4, “Connection Character Sets and Collations” ), and display the resulting strings using the  HEX()  function so that the exact string contents can be seen. An introducer indicates the character set for the following string, but does not change how the parser performs escape processing within the string. Escapes are always interpreted by the parser according to the character set given by  character_set_connection . SELECT ’Müller’;