content_image/813437.jpg
| 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. 

## 10.10.1 Unicode Character Sets 

This section describes the collations available for Unicode character sets and their differentiating properties. For general information about Unicode, see Section 10.9, “Unicode Support” . 

MySQL supports multiple Unicode character sets: 

• utf8mb4 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character. 

• utf8mb3 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to three bytes per character. 

• utf8 : An alias for utf8mb3 . 

• ucs2 : The UCS-2 encoding of the Unicode character set using two bytes per character. 

• utf16 : The UTF-16 encoding for the Unicode character set using two or four bytes per character. Like ucs2  but with an extension for supplementary characters. 

• utf16le : The UTF-16LE encoding for the Unicode character set. Like utf16  but little-endian rather than big-endian. 

• utf32 : The UTF-32 encoding for the Unicode character set using four bytes per character. 

<img src='content_image/813437.jpg'>

## Note 

The utf8mb3  character set is deprecated and you should expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use utf8mb4  instead. Although utf8  is currently an alias for utf8mb3 , at some point utf8  is expected to become a reference to utf8mb4 . To avoid ambiguity about the meaning of utf8 , consider specifying utf8mb4  explicitly for character set references instead of utf8 . 

utf8mb4 , utf16 , utf16le , and utf32  support Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) characters and supplementary characters that lie outside the BMP. utf8  and ucs2  support only BMP characters. 

Most Unicode character sets have a general collation (indicated by _general  in the name or by the absence of a language specifier), a binary collation (indicated by _bin  in the name), and several language-specific collations (indicated by language specifiers). For example, for utf8mb4 , utf8mb4_general_ci  and utf8mb4_bin  are its general and binary collations, and utf8mb4_danish_ci  is one of its language-specific collations. 

Most character sets have a single binary collation. utf8mb4  is an exception that has two: utf8mb4_bin and (as of MySQL 8.0.17) utf8mb4_0900_bin . These two binary collations have the same sort order but 

