What character encoding (Collation) should I use in Mysql?

Both serve: latin1_swedish_ci or utf8_general_ci .

To change the CHARSET and COLLATION of an existing bank:

ALTER DATABASE 'sua_base' CHARSET = Latin1 COLLATE = latin1_swedish_ci;

or

ALTER DATABASE 'sua_base' CHARSET = UTF8 COLLATE = utf8_general_ci;

Explanation

CHARSET and COLLATE are different things, in MySQL, each CHARSET has COLLATEs, each one with its particularity.

• latin1_general_ci : There is no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. Searching for "test", records such as "Test" or "TEST" will be returned.
• latin1_general_cs : Distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase letters. Searching for "test" will only return "test". Options such as "Test" and "TEST" will not be returned.
• latin1_swedish_ci : It does not distinguish upper and lower case letters or accented characters with cedilla, that is, the record that contains the word "Intuition" will be returned when there is a search for the word "intúicao"

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