Each simple character set has a configuration file located in the sql/share/charsets directory. For a character set named MYSYS, the file is named MYSET.xml. It uses <map> array elements to list character set properties. <map> elements appear within these elements:

For a complex character set as implemented in a ctype-MYSET.c file in the strings directory, there are corresponding arrays: ctype_MYSET[], to_lower_MYSET[], and so forth. Not every complex character set has all of the arrays. See also the existing ctype-*.c files for examples. See the CHARSET_INFO.txt file in the strings directory for additional information.

Most of the arrays are indexed by character value and have 256 elements. The <ctype> array is indexed by character value + 1 and has 257 elements. This is a legacy convention for handling EOF.

<ctype> array elements are bit values. Each element describes the attributes of a single character in the character set. Each attribute is associated with a bitmask, as defined in include/m_ctype.h:

#define _MY_U   01      /* Upper case */
#define _MY_L   02      /* Lower case */
#define _MY_NMR 04      /* Numeral (digit) */
#define _MY_SPC 010     /* Spacing character */
#define _MY_PNT 020     /* Punctuation */
#define _MY_CTR 040     /* Control character */
#define _MY_B   0100    /* Blank */
#define _MY_X   0200    /* heXadecimal digit */

The <ctype> value for a given character should be the union of the applicable bitmask values that describe the character. For example, 'A' is an uppercase character (_MY_U) as well as a hexadecimal digit (_MY_X), so its ctype value should be defined like this:

ctype['A'+1] = _MY_U | _MY_X = 01 | 0200 = 0201

The bitmask values in m_ctype.h are octal values, but the elements of the <ctype> array in MYSET.xml should be written as hexadecimal values.

The <lower> and <upper> arrays hold the lowercase and uppercase characters corresponding to each member of the character set. For example:

lower['A'] should contain 'a'
upper['a'] should contain 'A'

Each <collation> array indicates how characters should be ordered for comparison and sorting purposes. MySQL sorts characters based on the values of this information. In some cases, this is the same as the <upper> array, which means that sorting is case-insensitive. For more complicated sorting rules (for complex character sets), see the discussion of string collating in Section 10.12.2, “String Collating Support for Complex Character Sets”.