In North America, Windows ships with the "code page" defaulting to 437, "US ASCII".
Really Microsoft's US ASCII is misnamed. It ought to be called something like "Illiterate US ASCII", since it has some West European characters, but not enough to render many West European characters. Bill Gates copied it from a Wang word processor in 1995. I didn't make that up.
To see what code page you are running, open a command window and run
chcp
To read about code pages and chcp see
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chcp.mspx?mfr=true. For French you need code page 850, so try this ...
chcp 850
... login into the mysql client program
use test;
SET NAMES UTF8;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS french;
CREATE TABLE french (
a varchar(16) CHARACTER SET latin1 collate latin1_swedish_ci
);
INSERT INTO french values ('été'), ('voilà'), ('français');
SELECT * FROM french ;
+----------+
| a |
+----------+
| été |
| voilà |
| français |
+----------+
PB
http://www.artfulsoftware.com
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/05/2009 08:48PM by Peter Brawley.