How to find out the default server character set in mysql?

Question

Using MySQL in FreeBSD 8.2. How to find out the default server character set? Is there any command that I can run, or a file that I can verify?

UPDATE

Actually, I want to know how to find the default character set and the current server character set.

Answer 1

As described in Typing and sorting server characters :

Initially, the character set and server sorting depends on the parameters that you use when starting mysqld . You can use --character-set-server for a character set. Along with this, you can add --collation-server for sorting. If you do not specify a character set, it will be the same as saying --character-set-server=latin1 .

Thus, the default server character set is Windows-1252, which MySQL calls latin1 unless your copy of MySQL has been compiled with some other default value.

The manual further states:

The current server character set and collation can be determined from the values ​​of character_set_server and collation_server . These variables can be changed at runtime.

Therefore, to detect the server character set that is currently being used:

 SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_server' 

Answer 2

According to the documentation . That's what you need:

 SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%'; SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation%'; 

Or even better:

 SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'c%';