PHP, MySQL, Unicode, Set names.

[Eric Zhang]

I am trying to store unicode characters in Mysql using PHP. However, I found interesting however weird things:

I use Chinese character as sample unicode content.


My php page's header is always "UTF-8".

Secenario 1:
I created my table using utf8 as character set.
I enter some chinese character on my php page, and insert the data to the table.
No matter whether I have "mysql_query("set names 'utf8'",$connection);" in my php code, the chinese character get stored
in the database perfectly. Since if I didn't set names, the default connection character set is "latin_1", so how can the chinese character be perfectly encoded and stored.

Secenario 2:
I created my table using latin_1 as character set.
I enter some chinese character on my php page, and insert the data to the table.
As long as I don't do "mysql_query("set names 'utf8'",$connection);" in my php code, the chinese character get stored
in the database perfectly.

So now I am little bit confused:
- Whether I really need to create a table using "utf-8" character set to store unicode content, like chinese characters.
- Even if I had such a table, do I need to do "set names", since my experience told me that it works even I didn't set it.