Insert Greek Character to a MySQL table column without using PHP

Question

We have a MySQL table as below:

CREATE TABLE Test
(
ID INT(11),
Value VARCHAR(100)
);

I want to use INSERT query and load Greek data into Value column. I would like to reiterate that I do not want any involvement of PHP or any 3rd party vendor tool.

I have already tried with INSERT query as below. The query gets executed. When you perform a SELECT to the table we see ????? marks instead of the data.

Additionally, I have also tried changing the character set but does not help.

NOTE : The issue seems to seen in MySQL version 5.5 where as in v8.0 we see the Greek data

INSERT INTO TEST VALUES (1,'ΜΑΣΟΥΤΗΣ Δ. Α.Ε');

SELECT * FROM TEST;

The Expected result is to see the Greek data into the Table, but actually we see ?????.

Workbench directly should already support Greek and UTF-8 characters. [In this 5.7 demo](https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=mysql_5.7&fiddle=b8a8cb914eabcbf8325fd6cfe76895bb) there is no problem. — Tim Biegeleisen, May 29 '19 at 16:53
This is a question of character sets and collations. You probably need the `utf8mb4_general_ci` collation. `SHOW CREATE TABLE Test;` will reveal that. What is the collation of your `Value` column? You are using some kind of mysql client software, even if it's the command line client. Did you run it like this? `mysql --default-character-set=utf8mb4` ? Please [edit] your question to provide these important details. — O. Jones, May 29 '19 at 17:07

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 30 '19 at 05:21

5.5 defaulted to CHARACTER SET latin1 for any table using the default.

8.0's default is CHARACTER SET utf8mb4.

To get 5.5 to work correctly, specify the character set on the table definition. For Greek, either utf8 or utf8mb4 will work.

See "question mark" in Trouble with UTF-8 characters; what I see is not what I stored

Note: In 5.5 or 5.6, if you index a column that is VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4, you will get an error. This can be worked around in several ways.

See http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/limits#767_limit_in_innodb_indexes

Insert Greek Character to a MySQL table column without using PHP

1 Answers1