In MySQL how can I tell what character set a particular table is using?

Posted by muudscope on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by muudscope
Published on 2010-04-27T05:07:00Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 5:13 UTC
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mysql

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character-encoding

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unicode

I have a large mysql table that I think might be using the wrong character set. If so I'll need to change it using

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8

But since this is a very large table, I'd rather not run this command unless I have to. So my question is, how can I ask mysql what the character set is on a particular table?

I can call status in mysql to see the database's character set, but that doesn't necessarily mean all the tables have the same character set, right?

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