I think you should use: latin1_general_ci and on columns with spanish you should use latin1_spanish_ci.
English, French, Portuguese not having a separate collation I believe that they are included into latin1_general_ci ? Please observe the last part from a collation name: case sensitive (_cs) ... case insensitive (_ci) ... and binary (_bin) ! UTF8 consumes more space on disk ! If you issue a SHOW CHARACTER SET command mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET; You will notice the last column named Maxlen that defines how many bytes takes to store a letter. On utf8_general_ci you will notice 3... as on latin1_XXXX_xx you will only see 1... Although these values represent a MAX value... what you need will use at most 2 bytes per letter in UTF-8... but in latin1_xxx_xx will, for sure, will use one byte... on long texts this will count ! In my opinion you should stick to latin1_xxx_xx ! Afther some thought and aditional computation I declared myself satisfied with: latin2 - ISO 8859-2 Central European - latin2_general_ci - 1byte but I'm having Romanian + English + French columns. Try to read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset.html with no distraction arround you ! Gabriel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andre Matos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <mysql@lists.mysql.com> Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 9:29 PM Subject: utf8 x latin > Hi list, > I was wondering which one is better to use, "utf8_general_ci" or > "latin1_general_cs", with English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish? > Thanks. > Andre > -- > Andre Matos > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]