special characters

[Rich Mittel]

I should have posted this in the Newbie forum:

I realize that parts of this topic may already have been addressed somewhere, but I still turn up empty on answers to my specific question: How do I insert a unicode string literal into a MySQL table directly from the command line (no PHP/Python/etc). I'm trying to work with characters that have macrons (overbars). Here's how I try to insert the character ā into a table (after doing "SET NAMES utf8", "CHARSET utf8", and "SET character_set_server = utf8"):

mysql> create table test ( t varchar(10) character set utf8 );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)

mysql> insert into test values (char(257));
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from test;
+------+
| t |
+------+
| |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

So it shows up as a blank plus negative space. And when I try to cast it back to an integer I get:

mysql> select cast(t as signed) from test;
+-------------------+
| cast(t as signed) |
+-------------------+
| 0 |
+-------------------+
1 row in set, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

So what went in as 257 comes out strangely as 0. Please help! Btw, my xterm has no problem displaying general unicode characters.