MySQL 4.1的字符集支持(Character Set Support)有两个方面：字符集(Character set)和排序方式(Collation)。对于字符集的支持细化到四个层次: 服务器(server)，数据库(database)，数据表(table)和连接(connection)。

查看系统的字符集和排序方式的设定可以通过下面的两条命令：

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_%';

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| Variable_name | Value |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| character_set_client | latin1 |

| character_set_connection | latin1 |

| character_set_database | latin1 |

| character_set_results | latin1 |

| character_set_server | latin1 |

| character_set_system | utf8 |

| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation_%';

+----------------------+-------------------+

| Variable_name | Value |

+----------------------+-------------------+

| collation_connection | latin1_swedish_ci |

| collation_database | latin1_swedish_ci |

| collation_server | latin1_swedish_ci |

+----------------------+-------------------+

3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

上面列出的值就是系统的默认值。(很奇怪系统怎么默认是latin1的瑞典语排序方式)...

当我们按照原来的方式通过PHP存取MySQL数据库时，就算设置了表的默认字符集为utf8并且通过UTF-8编码发送查询，你会发现存入数据库的仍然是乱码。问题就出在这个connection连接层上。解决方法是在发送查询前执行一下下面这句：

SET NAMES 'utf8';

它相当于下面的三句指令：

SET character_set_client = utf8;

SET character_set_results = utf8;

SET character_set_connection = utf8;

再试试看，就正常了。