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Does the language of a VARCHAR matter?

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 3:30 pm
by Josh1billion
I installed WAMP today to start work on a new project, then I installed PhpMyAdmin. It seems that the VARCHAR's are set via default to the language "latin1_swedish_ci". Is this fine (the Swedish language uses the same alphabet as I understand) or will I run into trouble in the future?

I'm 99% sure it's fine, but I just want to get a second opinion before I start some heavy work..

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 4:03 pm
by Christopher
You will be fine until you want to store some extended chars. If you stick with ASCII then you are fine.

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 6:15 pm
by Josh1billion
Alright, thanks for the information, I have now converted all VARCHAR fields to ascii_general_ci.

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 8:07 pm
by volka
You might be interested in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/ ... html[quote] MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual :: 9 Character Set Support :: 9.1 Character Sets and Collations in General[/quote]

Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 9:06 am
by josa
It is fine. latin1_swedish_ci is not the character set - it's the collation. The character set is latin1 by default. The collation latin1_swedish_ci is the default collation for all new MySQL installations which should explain why you have it in your database as well.

/josa