Re: How to convert UTF-8 (hex) value to Unicode Character?. Been trying for more than a week. Please help.

[Rick James]

ucs2 has 2-byte codes. You can see them with SELECT HEX(col). Please do this to show what the bytes look like. (Seeing the character does not help -- too many other things could be fiddling with it.)

utf8 uses 1- to 3-byte codes.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-conversion.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-repertoire.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-convert.html -- as in:

mysql> select hex(convert(unhex('efbd81') using utf8));
+------------------------------------------+
| hex(convert(unhex('efbd81') using utf8)) |
+------------------------------------------+
| EFBD81                                   |
+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select hex(convert(unhex('efbd81') using ucs2));
+------------------------------------------+
| hex(convert(unhex('efbd81') using ucs2)) |
+------------------------------------------+
| 00EFBD81                                 |
+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
| character_set_database   | utf8
| character_set_server     | utf8
| character_set_system     | utf8
...