Save Data in any language in Database using Collation | Techbirds

Posted on: March 26, 2014 /

Categories: PHP / Author Name: Shivek Parmar

If someone wants to save any data in any language like Hindi, Japanese, French, Punjabi, Marathi etc then he/she can use  “utf8_general_ci” collation.

What is collation?

A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set. Let’s make the distinction clear with an example of an imaginary character set.

The collation is how to compare caracters, in latin9, there are letters as e é è ê f, if sorted by their binary representation, it will go “e f é ê è” but if the collation is right, you’ll have them in the order you thought they would be.

What is charset?

A character set is a set of symbols and encodings.

Suppose that we have an alphabet with four letters: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘a’, ‘b’. We give each letter a number: ‘A’ = 0, ‘B’ = 1, ‘a’ = 2, ‘c’ = 3. The letter ‘A’ is a symbol, the number 0 is the encoding for ‘A’, and the combination of all four letters and their encodings is a character set.

Now, suppose that we want to compare two string values, ‘A’ and ‘B’. The simplest way to do this is to look at the encodings: 0 for ‘A’ and 1 for ‘B’. Because 0 is less than 1, we say ‘A’ is less than ‘B’. Now, what we’ve just done is apply a collation to our character set. The collation is a set of rules (only one rule in this case): “compare the encodings.” We call this simplest of all possible collations a binary collation.

But what if we want to say that the lowercase and uppercase letters are equivalent? Then we would have at least two rules: (1) treat the lowercase letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ as equivalent to ‘A’ and ‘B’; (2) then compare the encodings. We call this a case-insensitive collation. It’s a little more complex than a binary collation.

In real life, most character sets have many characters: not just ‘A’ and ‘B’ but whole alphabets, sometimes multiple alphabets or eastern writing systems with thousands of characters, along with many special symbols and punctuation marks. Also in real life, most collations have many rules: not just case insensitivity but also accent insensitivity (an “accent” is a mark attached to a character as in German ‘ö’) and multiple-character mappings (such as the rule that ‘ö’ = ‘OE’ in one of the two German collations).

Always Remember that default Collation in SQL is “latin1_swedish_ci” therefore you have to change the collation to “utf8_general_ci to use it for inserting different data in different languages.

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