how do I insert unicode characters into mysql with an insert statement?

Question

I\'m doing this directly in the mysql client. I want to do the following:

INSERT INTO MYTABLE VALUES(1,12,\'\\u5c40\\u5c42\');

So it would

Answer 1

What's the type of your table data? char or varchar? Your issue isn't quite clear, are you getting an error from that line? You might be experiencing: http://dev.hubspot.com/bid/7049/MySQL-and-Unicode-Three-Gotchas.

EDIT:

Quite a bit of information is within these three pages that should be able to help: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/string-syntax.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-literal.html

but I also saw this :

INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (1, 12, _ucs2'\x5C40\x5C42');

Answer 2

Using the mysql console, I can just paste your unicode characters into an insert command and mysql accepts it. Here's a little test I did using your data:

CREATE TABLE xx (col1 varchar(20));
insert into xx values ('局层');
select * from xx;
+---------+
| col1    |
+---------+
| 局层   |
+---------+

My db uses default encoding (latin1).

Have you tried just pasting them in? What error, if any, do you get?

Answer 3

It will depend on what you are programming with or if just dealing with the database directly. Are you just trying to do a straight insert from querybrowser or some other tool or are you doing this via a web app. IF the second, what language is the webapp using. If it is a .net app you can try setting the character set in the connection string i.e. charset=utf8

If you are doing something with php then take a look at this link http://randomchaos.com/documents/?source=php_and_unicode

You could also go and set the default character set on the database to UTF-8. Not sure how this will impact the current data so be sure to backup everything before making changes to the database.