What happens if I connect to a utf8 MySQL DB table using latin1?

Question

Interesting question... if I have a MySQL table with CHARSET=utf8, and I open a connection with latin1 encoding, what happens?

I tried this, and even characters such as ß and æ could be stored and retrieved properly. Those characters are represented with different byte sequences in utf8 and in latin1, so I didn't expect it to work.

Is MySQL doing some kind of on-the-fly translation between character encodings?

Answer 1

No, try to dump the database to a file

mysqldump .... > file.sql and compare the encoding of the file

Answer 2

Yes, mysql does make a chrset conversion, depending on configuration. To change the chrset of your connection, you can use SET NAMES like

SET NAMES utf8;