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Julian MatzFlag for Ireland

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MySQL Collation

Hi! Just wondering what's the best collation to use. Prior to MySQL 5, I don't think I had this choice...

I would put my money on utf8_general_ci, but I also see ascii_general_ci in use, and the default seems to be latin1_swedish_ci ......
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mankowitz
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ncoo

latin1_swedish or latin1_general are both good, I've not had a problem with either for Europe, the Americas(N&S) and India.

They do say if you're page is going to be of content type UTF8 you should use a UTF8 collation.

But what ever you do make sure any key/foreign fields are all of the same type, otherwilse you will be in for some real trouble. Trust me on that one!
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Thanks!

I'm using mainly English, sometimes French, German, Italian, etc. for content management systems.

My websites are all UTF8 (my Apache server forces this content-type) and the MySQL data is usually inserted through HTML input fields and PHP, and I also sometimes put HTML into the database. That wouldn't make a difference, no?
No, you should be fine with that.
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Thanks for your comments!

latin1_swedish - is this what most people use because it seems to be the default or is it because it supports the most European/Latin language characters??

Are there any disadvantages to using UTF8?

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Thanks!