I think you should use: latin1_general_ci  and on columns with spanish you
should use latin1_spanish_ci.

English, French, Portuguese not having a separate collation I believe that
they are included into latin1_general_ci ?

Please observe the last part from a collation name: case sensitive (_cs) ...
case insensitive (_ci) ... and binary (_bin) !

UTF8 consumes more space on disk !
If you issue a SHOW CHARACTER SET command

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET;

You will notice the last column named Maxlen that defines how many bytes
takes to store a letter.

On utf8_general_ci you will notice 3... as on latin1_XXXX_xx you will only
see 1...
Although these values represent a MAX value... what you need will use at
most 2 bytes per letter in UTF-8... but in latin1_xxx_xx will, for sure,
will use one byte... on long texts this will count !

In my opinion you should stick to latin1_xxx_xx !

Afther some thought and aditional computation I declared myself satisfied
with:
        latin2 - ISO 8859-2 Central European - latin2_general_ci - 1byte

but I'm having Romanian + English + French columns.

Try to read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset.html with no
distraction arround you !

Gabriel

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andre Matos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <mysql@lists.mysql.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 9:29 PM
Subject: utf8 x latin


> Hi list,
> I was wondering which one is better to use, "utf8_general_ci" or
> "latin1_general_cs", with English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish?
> Thanks.
> Andre
> --
> Andre Matos
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> -- 
> MySQL General Mailing List
> For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
> To unsubscribe:    http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to