MYSQL Column Collations: Difference between latin1 and latin2

Question

I was currently setting up a database for a webpage when I ran over the Column Collations latin1 and latin2 in PhpMyAdmin. After research on the difference, the only thing I found was that latin1 is for west-europeans and latin2 for central-europeans. What´s the difference in the charset, though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-2 — ScaisEdge, Sep 03 '17 at 16:04
You should just use utf8. I would even prefer utf8mb4, but PHP clients don't support it yet. — Bill Karwin, Sep 03 '17 at 18:07
@BillKarwin could you please clarify what do you mean by PHP clients here... ? — humble_wolf, Oct 07 '17 at 18:13
@BillKarwin This is a pretty old question of mine; I´m using utf8mb4 as encoding by now. I´m not getting any problems with it. — 3x071c, Oct 08 '17 at 10:24

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 03 '17 at 18:06

1

The Charset is what is different. The Collation is the ordering of the characters; since there are different characters in the two charsets, it is not relevant to talk about differences in collation.

First pick latin1 or latin2 based on what characters you need. (Better yet, pick utf8 so you can get both sets of characters.) Second, pick the collation desired. (Often, the default collation is "good enough".)

edited Sep 03 '17 at 18:06

Bill Karwin

538,548
86
673
828

answered Sep 03 '17 at 18:02

Rick James

135,179
13
127
222

Thanks! That clarified it for me :) – 3x071c Sep 05 '17 at 16:29

MYSQL Column Collations: Difference between latin1 and latin2

1 Answers1