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I have seen certain questions and bugs related to encoding and collation. Could anyone of the visitors explain the difference in MySQL domain?

Ghazanfar Mir
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3 Answers3

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Encoding refers to that character set used.
Collation determines the sort order.

See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-general.html

Johan
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Excellent answers found here, at programmers.SE:

collation defines the behaviour of comparison operators: =, >, <, <=, >= ...

Community
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T.Todua
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I think following qualifies as a better definition for Encoding

Encoding is an algorithm that translates a list of numbers to binary so it can be stored on disk. For example UTF-8 would translate the number sequence 1, 2, 3, 4 like this: “00000001 00000010 00000011 00000100″.

Source: http://www.calipus.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-character-sets-encoding-collations/

AbcAeffchen
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