Boost
C++ Libraries
...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Boost
C++ Libraries
...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
MySQL defines a character set as "a set of symbols and their respective
encodings". ascii,
latin1, utf8
and utf16 are character sets
supported by MySQL.
A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set.
For example, a case-insensitive collation will make strings that only differ
in case compare equal. All collations are associated to a single character
set. For example, utf8_spanish_ci
is a case-insensitive collation associated to the utf8
character set. Every character set has a default collation, which will be
used if a character set without a collation is specified. For example, latin1_swedish_ci is the default collation
for the latin1 character
set.
You can find more information about these concepts in the official MySQL docs on character sets.
Every connection has an associated character set and collation. The connection's character set determines the encoding for character strings sent to and retrieved from the server. This includes SQL query strings, string fields and column names in metadata. The connection's collation is used for string literal comparison.
Every session you establish can have its own different character set and collation. You can specify this in two ways:
When calling connection::connect
or connection::handshake,
using handshake_params::connection_collation.
You specify a numeric ID that identifies the collation to use, and your
connection will use the character set associated to this collation. You
can find collation IDs in the <boost/mysql/mysql_collations.hpp>
and <boost/mysql/mariadb_collations.hpp>
headers.
The problem with this approach is that if you specify a collation ID
that is unknown to the server (e.g. utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
for an old MySQL 5.7 server), the handshake operation will succeed but
the connection will sillently fall back to the
server's default character set, (usually latin1,
which is not Unicode).
SET NAMES
SQL statement. For example, "SET NAMES
utf8mb4" will set the current connection's character
set to utf8mb4 and the
connection's collation to utf8mb4's default collation. If the character
set is unknown, the SET NAMES statement will fail. You can
use connection::query
to issue the statement:
results result; conn.query("SET NAMES utf8mb4", result); // Further operations can assume utf8mb4 as conn's charset
Both of the above methods are shortcuts to set several session-level variables. The ones that impact this library's behavior are:
character_set_client
determines the encoding that SQL statements sent to the server should
have. This includes the SQL strings in connection::query,
connection::prepare_statement,
and string parameters passed to connection::execute_statement.
Not all character sets are permissible in character_set_client.
The server will accept setting this variable to any UTF-8 character set,
but won't accept UTF-16.
character_set_results
determines the encoding that the server will use to send any kind of
result, including string fields retrieved by connection::query
and connection::execute_statement,
metadata like metadata::column_name
and error messages.
Note that, when you define a string column with a character set (e.g.
"CREATE TABLE t1 (col1 VARCHAR(5) CHARACTER
SET latin1)"), the column's character set will be
used for storage and comparisons, but not for client communication. If
you set character_set_results
to utf16, any field obtained
by SELECTing col1 will be UTF16-encoded, and not
latin1-encoded. Note also that metadata::column_collation
reflects the charset and collation the server has converted the column
to before sending it to the client. In the above example, metadata::column_collation will be the default
collation for UTF16, rather than latin1_swedish_ci.
The table below summarizes the encoding used by each piece of functionality in this library:
|
Functionality |
Encoding given by... |
|---|---|
|
SQL query strings passed to |
|
|
String values passed as parameters to |
|
|
String fields retrieved by |
|
|
Metadata strings: |
|
|
Server-generated error messages: |
|
|
Informational messages: |
ASCII. These can only contain ASCII characters and are always ASCII encoded. More info in this section. |