Non-English User Names

[David Woods]

This seems like such a basic question, but I can't figure it out, and I can't find any discussion of it in the documentation.

I've got international users. Users from Europe who want accented characters in their usernames and passwords. Users from Asia with, say, who want chinese characters in their usernames and passwords.

I can create UTF-8 usernames and passwords. That's no problem.

But I can't seem to USE them. I can't connect with MySQL Administrator or the Query Browser using any account that has characters outside the 26 English characters. Forget about connecting from my Python application. I get "MySQL Error Number 1045 Access Denied for user ..."

I've tried specifying the configuration parameter:
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

I can't figure out how to set my server up to use anything other than latin1 for the initial connection string. But even with that, I can't use all of the Latin-1 characters, only the ones in English, for my username and password to establish the connection.

Once I'm connected, I can use Chinese characters in Database names and in data of all sorts, but I can't seem to make a connection even with an account name as simple as "Tëst".

I've tried it using MySQL 4.1.14 on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X, always with the same results.