MYSQL Protocol String Character Representation

[abhijit shingate]

Hi All,
I have a requirement where i need to implement Java based Proxy server for MySQL clients. Idea is to be able to use any of MySQL connectors to directly talk to Java Based Server.

I am going through the MySQL protocol documentation.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/internals/en/string.html

But i am not able to find information about how to interpret string bytes. Are those all ascii strings i.e. one byte is one character from ASCII set ? or Base64 encoding to be used? Unicode strings?

Appreciate any help!!

Thanks & Regards,
Abhijit