Western European character sets cover most West European languages, such as French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, and English.
ascii (US ASCII) collations:
ascii_bin
ascii_general_ci (default)
cp850 (DOS West European) collations:
cp850_bin
cp850_general_ci (default)
dec8 (DEC Western European) collations:
dec8_bin
dec8_swedish_ci (default)
hp8 (HP Western European) collations:
hp8_bin
hp8_english_ci (default)
latin1 (cp1252 West European) collations:
latin1_bin
latin1_danish_ci
latin1_general_ci
latin1_general_cs
latin1_german1_ci
latin1_german2_ci
latin1_spanish_ci
latin1_swedish_ci (default)
MySQL's latin1 is the same as the Windows cp1252 character set. This means it is the same as the official ISO 8859-1 or IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) latin1, except that IANA latin1 treats the code points between 0x80 and 0x9f as “undefined,” whereas cp1252, and therefore MySQL's latin1, assign characters for those positions. For example, 0x80 is the Euro sign. For the “undefined” entries in cp1252, MySQL translates 0x81 to Unicode 0x0081, 0x8d to 0x008d, 0x8f to 0x008f, 0x90 to 0x0090, and 0x9d to 0x009d.
The latin1_swedish_ci collation is the default that probably is used by the majority of MySQL customers. Although it is frequently said that it is based on the Swedish/Finnish collation rules, there are Swedes and Finns who disagree with this statement.
The latin1_german1_ci and latin1_german2_ci collations are based on the DIN-1 and DIN-2 standards, where DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (the German equivalent of ANSI). DIN-1 is called the “dictionary collation” and DIN-2 is called the “phone book collation.” For an example of the effect this has in comparisons or when doing searches, see Section 10.8.6, “Examples of the Effect of Collation”.
latin1_german1_ci (dictionary) rules:
Ä = A Ö = O Ü = U ß = s
latin1_german2_ci (phone-book) rules:
Ä = AE Ö = OE Ü = UE ß = ss
In the latin1_spanish_ci collation, ñ (n-tilde) is a separate letter between n and o.
macroman (Mac West European) collations:
macroman_bin
macroman_general_ci (default)
swe7 (7bit Swedish) collations:
swe7_bin
swe7_swedish_ci (default)