Re: MySQLAdministrator / MySQLDump generates ANSI instead of UTF8 - why ?

[Rick James]

Files do not have an encoding associated with them. The best that programs can do is to read the file and make a guess.

True, ASCII encodings are as subset of UTF8 encodings.

The UNICODE encoding is probably a 16-bit way of storing strings -- two bytes per 'character'. It is NOT "utf8", but it can (mostly) be easily converted do/from utf8.

Utf8 uses 1-3 bytes (sometimes more) per character. ("Byte" is an 8-bit thingie; 'character' has no particular size or encoding.) English text takes 1 byte per character in utf8; Chinese takes 3 (usually). (But then, a Chinese character often represents a whole 'word'.)

The .sql file you generated is just a bunch of bits. If the writer faithfully encoded stuff in utf8 to write to it, and the reader assumes utf8, then all is well. But it is up to you to be sure the writer and reader both have the same SET NAMES (or whatever); there is nothing in the file, itself, nor in the directory for the file that says "this is utf8-encoded". (Files and file systems were invented decades ago by English-speaking people. Even ASCII encoding took a couple of decades to be invented. In the early days NO machine had even a megabyte of memory; characters were crammed into 5 or 6 bits as a cost savings. Moving to 8-bit bytes raised the price for storing English text by a huge amount.)