Why is mysql 4 not respecting --character_set_results and --default-character-set command arguments?

Question

I have a table 'ABC' (charset = utf8) and these are my character set variable values
[mysql version 4.1.23 - Server] and Client version - 3.23.57


mysql> show variables like 'character%';

+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
| 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       | /home/y/share/mysql/charsets/      |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now if I run a query in mysql client

mysql>select * into outfile '/tmp/a' from ABC;
Query OK, 26 rows affected (0.00 sec)

and check the filetype of /tmp/a

[satyavrk-~]$: file /tmp/a
/tmp/a:UTF-8 Unicode text

Q1)Since my character_set_results is latin1 , how is the filetype of /tmp/a is UTF-8 instead of latin1 or ISO-8859 English text?

Alternatively if I run

[satyavrk-~]$:  mysqldump -uroot  --databases my --tables ABC  --default-character-set=utf8 > 63794

and do

[satyavrk-~]$: file 63794
63794: ISO-8859 English text, with very long lines

Q2)Since I specified --default-character-set as UTF-8 the resultset should be utf8. But it is not! Why?

In both cases file type is different from expected

Can any one explain the point I am missing

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-05T17:22:28

SET NAMES is convenient and probably just what you need.

Why is mysql 4 not respecting --character_set_results and --default-character-set command arguments?

2 Answers