It is a compatibility setting, intended for legacy code that was written for old versions of Windows that were not Unicode enabled. Versions in the Windows 9x family, Windows ME was the last and widely ignored one. With “Not Set” or “Use Multi-Byte Character Set” selected, all Windows API functions that take a string as … Read more
From MySQL docs: A character set is a set of symbols and encodings. A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set. Let’s make the distinction clear with an example of an imaginary character set. Suppose that we have an alphabet with four letters: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘a’, ‘b’. We give … Read more
Stand-alone utility approach iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt -f ENCODING the encoding of the input -t ENCODING the encoding of the output You don’t have to specify either of these arguments. They will default to your current locale, which is usually UTF-8.
For those people still arriving at this question in 2020 or later, there are newer options that may be better than both of these. For example, utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. All these collations are for the UTF-8 character encoding. The differences are in how text is sorted and compared. _unicode_ci and _general_ci are two different sets of rules … Read more