Using Chinese Characters to Name MySQL Tables

Question

Hello,

What precautions must be taken to use Chinese characters as MySQL table names?

Thanks in advance,

John

Answer 1

You just need to be sure to properly escape table name anywhere using backqoutes. Besides this, it should be pretty safe to use any characters.

PS: And whenever non Chinese writing person will have to modify your code he will hate you for that.

Answer 2

Although you can probably do it safely within MySQL, whether it's right or wrong the reality is that you may end up having a hard time finding support for table names with unicode characters when using third party tools. That might include back-up solutions, development languages and APIs, etc. While it's nice to try to be global thinking, in this case I would probably stick with "standard" table names.

Answer 3

SQL supports delimited identifiers to allow table or column names to contain SQL keywords, whitespace, punctuation, other special characters, or international characters.

In MySQL, use back-quotes (or set the ANSI_QUOTES SQL mode to use standard double-quotes).

Example:

mysql> create table `桌子` (id serial);
mysql> show create table `桌子`\G
--------------
show create table `桌子`
--------------

*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: 桌子
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `桌子` (
  `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)