behaviour of latin1 in mysql

[madhur garg]

I have some confusion on latin1 behaviour

As per my understanding latin1 supports 256 characters and use 1 byte per character.

I created 2 tables with latin1 and utf8 charset
I am using mysql 5.7

set names latin1;

CREATE TABLE `foo` (
`i` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`v` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

insert into foo values ('Ũ');
insert into foo(v) values ('ϧ');
insert into foo(v) values ('þ');
mysql> select v, hex(v) from foo;
+------+--------+
| v | hex(v) |
+------+--------+
| Ũ | C5A8 |
| ϧ | CFA7 |
| þ | C3BE |
+------+--------+

--------------------------------------------

CREATE TABLE foo_utf8 ( `i` int(11) DEFAULT NULL, `v` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

insert into foo_utf8(v) values ('þ');
insert into foo_utf8(v) values ('ϧ');
insert into foo_utf8(v) values ('Ũ');

mysql> select v, hex(v) from foo_utf8;
+------+----------+
| v | hex(v) |
+------+----------+
| þ | C383C2BE |
| ϧ | C38FC2A7 |
| Ũ | C385C2A8 |
+------+----------+

-----------------------------------

In both the cases client encoding was latin1

I am not able to understand
1. How come I am able to insert characters with unicode greater then 256 in latin table
2. how come I am able to fetch such data from latin1
3. If I am able to insert/ access all characters in Latin1, then why I need ant other encoding like utf8
4. why hex values are different for both the tables with different charset, although client encoding is same
5. why I am able to fetch correct data even though hex values are different and client encoding is same

please help me in understand or share any blogs so that I can go deeper to understand how charset and encoding works

thanks
Madhur