Req #52453 [Com]: Connection charset seems arbitrary

Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52453&edit=1 ID: 52453 Comment by: jeroen at asystance dot nl Reported by: jeroen at asystance dot nl Summary: Connection charset seems arbitrary Status: Open Type: Feature/Change Request Package: MySQLi related Operating System: Linux PHP Version: 5.3.3 Block user comment: N New Comment: BTW: when I make the same connection as in the first example, but use the mysql CLI client instead of php, I get mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%'; +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | character_set_client | latin1 | | character_set_connection | latin1 | | character_set_database | utf8 | | character_set_filesystem | binary | | character_set_results | latin1 | | character_set_server | utf8 | | character_set_system | utf8 | | character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ So PHP's mysql_connect() behaves differently from mysql cli! Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-07-27 11:00:11] jeroen at asystance dot nl Description: ------------ The connection_charset used by a mysql/mysqli connection seems arbitrary - at least I cannot figure out how it is determined. The documentation provides no clues as to which charset is used by default. I've tried connecting to different mysql servers from different shell servers and can't figure out how the default charset is determined. As to find out which one is used, open a mysql/mysqli (procedural or object-oriented doesn't matter) connection and use mysql_client_encoding() / mysqli_get_charset() or "SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';" to find out. This probably is just a documentation problem, but maybe the default could be chosen more sensibly: for example, the mysql server database's charset seems the most sensible default. For example, connecting from a shell that has en_US.UTF-8 as locale, I get: character_set_client: utf8 character_set_connection: utf8 character_set_database: utf8 character_set_filesystem: binary character_set_results: utf8 character_set_server: utf8 character_set_system: utf8 character_sets_dir: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ Switching to en_US.iso88591 doesn't change anything. So it would seem some server setting determines the charset, right? However, connecting to the same mysql server from another system (though from intranet instead of internet), I get: character_set_client: latin1 character_set_connection: latin1 character_set_database: utf8 character_set_filesystem: binary character_set_results: latin1 character_set_server: utf8 character_set_system: utf8 character_sets_dir: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ Again, the client locale doesn't influence this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52453&edit=1