This section indicates which character sets MySQL supports. There is one subsection for each group of related character sets. For each character set, the permissible collations are listed.

To list the available character sets and their default collations, use the SHOW CHARACTER SET statement or query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA CHARACTER_SETS table. For example:

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset  | Description                     | Default collation   | Maxlen |
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| armscii8 | ARMSCII-8 Armenian              | armscii8_general_ci |      1 |
| ascii    | US ASCII                        | ascii_general_ci    |      1 |
| big5     | Big5 Traditional Chinese        | big5_chinese_ci     |      2 |
| binary   | Binary pseudo charset           | binary              |      1 |
| cp1250   | Windows Central European        | cp1250_general_ci   |      1 |
| cp1251   | Windows Cyrillic                | cp1251_general_ci   |      1 |
| cp1256   | Windows Arabic                  | cp1256_general_ci   |      1 |
| cp1257   | Windows Baltic                  | cp1257_general_ci   |      1 |
| cp850    | DOS West European               | cp850_general_ci    |      1 |
| cp852    | DOS Central European            | cp852_general_ci    |      1 |
| cp866    | DOS Russian                     | cp866_general_ci    |      1 |
| cp932    | SJIS for Windows Japanese       | cp932_japanese_ci   |      2 |
| dec8     | DEC West European               | dec8_swedish_ci     |      1 |
| eucjpms  | UJIS for Windows Japanese       | eucjpms_japanese_ci |      3 |
| euckr    | EUC-KR Korean                   | euckr_korean_ci     |      2 |
| gb18030  | China National Standard GB18030 | gb18030_chinese_ci  |      4 |
| gb2312   | GB2312 Simplified Chinese       | gb2312_chinese_ci   |      2 |
| gbk      | GBK Simplified Chinese          | gbk_chinese_ci      |      2 |
| geostd8  | GEOSTD8 Georgian                | geostd8_general_ci  |      1 |
| greek    | ISO 8859-7 Greek                | greek_general_ci    |      1 |
| hebrew   | ISO 8859-8 Hebrew               | hebrew_general_ci   |      1 |
| hp8      | HP West European                | hp8_english_ci      |      1 |
| keybcs2  | DOS Kamenicky Czech-Slovak      | keybcs2_general_ci  |      1 |
| koi8r    | KOI8-R Relcom Russian           | koi8r_general_ci    |      1 |
| koi8u    | KOI8-U Ukrainian                | koi8u_general_ci    |      1 |
| latin1   | cp1252 West European            | latin1_swedish_ci   |      1 |
| latin2   | ISO 8859-2 Central European     | latin2_general_ci   |      1 |
| latin5   | ISO 8859-9 Turkish              | latin5_turkish_ci   |      1 |
| latin7   | ISO 8859-13 Baltic              | latin7_general_ci   |      1 |
| macce    | Mac Central European            | macce_general_ci    |      1 |
| macroman | Mac West European               | macroman_general_ci |      1 |
| sjis     | Shift-JIS Japanese              | sjis_japanese_ci    |      2 |
| swe7     | 7bit Swedish                    | swe7_swedish_ci     |      1 |
| tis620   | TIS620 Thai                     | tis620_thai_ci      |      1 |
| ucs2     | UCS-2 Unicode                   | ucs2_general_ci     |      2 |
| ujis     | EUC-JP Japanese                 | ujis_japanese_ci    |      3 |
| utf16    | UTF-16 Unicode                  | utf16_general_ci    |      4 |
| utf16le  | UTF-16LE Unicode                | utf16le_general_ci  |      4 |
| utf32    | UTF-32 Unicode                  | utf32_general_ci    |      4 |
| utf8     | UTF-8 Unicode                   | utf8_general_ci     |      3 |
| utf8mb4  | UTF-8 Unicode                   | utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci  |      4 |
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+

In cases where a character set has multiple collations, it might not be clear which collation is most suitable for a given application. To avoid choosing the wrong collation, it can be helpful to perform some comparisons with representative data values to make sure that a given collation sorts values the way you expect.