Unicode (hexadecimal) character literals in MySQL

literals, mysql, unicode, unicode-literals

Solution

Thanks for your suggestions, but I think the problem was further back in the system.

There's a lot of levels to unpick, but as far as I can tell, (on this server at least) the command

set names utf8

makes the utf-8 handling work correctly, whereas

set character set utf8

doesn't.

In my environment, these are being called from PHP using PDO, for what difference that may make.

Thanks anyway!

Problem

Is there a way to specify Unicode character literals in MySQL? I want to replace a Unicode character with an Ascii character, something like the following: ``` Update MyTbl Set MyFld = Replace(MyFld, "ẏ", "y") ``` But I'm using even more obscure characters which are not available in most fonts, so I want to be able to use Unicode character literals, something like ``` Update MyTbl Set MyFld = Replace(MyFld, "\u1e8f", "y") ``` This SQL statement is being invoked from a PHP script - the first form is not only unreadable, but it doesn't actually work!

Original source