If you are familiar with MySQL, you probably already know that it comes with multiple character encodings. One of the main encodings in the MySQL world and on the web, in general, is UTF-8 – it is used in almost every web and mobile application, and is widely considered to be the “default” option as far as MySQL is concerned. UTF-8 also supports multiple character sets and has a couple of other features unique to itself: in this blog, we are going to go through them, and also we are going to go through one feature in particular – the fact that MySQL’s “UTF-8” is not considered to be the “real” UTF-8. Confused? Read on!

What Is UTF-8?

To start with, UTF-8 is one of the most common character encodings. In UTF-8, each character that we have is represented by a range of one to four bytes. As such, we have a couple of character sets: