SHOW CHARACTER SET
z
b
y
T
r
This statement provides a static list of available character sets in TiDB. The output does not reflect any attributes of the current connection or user.
Synopsis
ShowCharsetStmt:
CharsetKw:
Examples
SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+---------+-------------------------------------+-------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+---------+-------------------------------------+-------------------+--------+
| ascii | US ASCII | ascii_bin | 1 |
| binary | binary | binary | 1 |
| gbk | Chinese Internal Code Specification | gbk_chinese_ci | 2 |
| latin1 | Latin1 | latin1_bin | 1 |
| utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_bin | 3 |
| utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_bin | 4 |
+---------+-------------------------------------+-------------------+--------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
MySQL compatibility
The usage of this statement is understood to be fully compatible with MySQL. However, charsets in TiDB may have different default collations compared with MySQL. For details, refer to Compatibility with MySQL. Any other compatibility differences should be reported via an issue on GitHub.
See also
SHOW CHARACTER SET | TiDB SQL Statement Referencewas last updated 4/22/2025, 6:53:44 AM: update the default collation of GBK from gbk_bin to gbk_chinese_ci (#20818) (#20830)