Re: UTF-8 CHARSET and CHAR_LENGTH()

[achernow]

I found the problem. My client connection was using latin1. Once I changed it to utf8 with collation of utf_collation_ci, CHAR_LENGTH and LENGTH returned the correct results.

The data was being escaped incorrectly. An ASCII 0x27 ESC was being added to the front and back of the utf8 character(s). I was inseting the characters from a php and using mysql_real_escape_string().

Added the below to my.cnf:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
init_connect='set collation_connection=utf8_unicode_ci;'

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

Once I restarted mysqld, everything worked as expected.

To answer my own question and maybe help others, CHAR(2) does means 2 characters not bytes.

/slakr