EC
1346
MariaDBerrorconfigurationhigh confidence

Unknown character set

Production Risk

Low — DDL or SET fails.

What this means

A column definition, SET NAMES, or CHARACTER SET clause specified a character set name that MySQL does not recognise.

Why it happens
  1. 1Typo in character set name
  2. 2Character set not compiled into this MySQL build
  3. 3Restoring a dump from a different MySQL variant with custom charsets
How to reproduce
trigger — this will error
trigger — this will error
CREATE TABLE t (name VARCHAR(100) CHARACTER SET nonexistent);

expected output

ERROR 1346 (42000): Unknown character set: 'nonexistent'

Fix 1

List available character sets

List available character sets
SHOW CHARACTER SET;

Why this works

Shows all installed character sets.

Fix 2

Use utf8mb4

Use utf8mb4
CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Why this works

Recommended default for full Unicode support.

Version notes

Sources
Official documentation ↗

MySQL 8.0 — 1346 ER_UNKNOWN_CHARACTER_SET

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