MySQL Bugs: #7173: Add charset and collation to 'DESCRIBE table' output

Bug #7173	Add charset and collation to 'DESCRIBE table' output
Submitted:	10 Dec 2004 15:57	Modified:	15 Feb 2006 13:00
Reporter:	Struchkov Vladimir	Email Updates:
Status:	Verified	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Information schema	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	>=4.1	OS:	Any (All)
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
I want to view charset & collation at the description of table by running 
mysql>desc <table name>
or
mysql>explain <table name>

How to repeat:

Thank you for the reasonable feature request. It is more appropriate for SHOW CREATE TABLE, but separate different collations for columns may be also reported by DESC.

Hello Vova,

Starting from 5.0 you can use INFORMATION_SCHEMA.

Workaround. Use SHOW COLUMNS rather than DESCRIBE. SHOW COLUMNS supports a FULL keyword such that SHOW FULL COLUMNS includes a Collation field for character columns. The Collation value gives you the collation explicitly and the character set by implication. Example:

mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM t\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
     Field: i
      Type: int(11)
 Collation: NULL
      Null: YES
       Key: 
   Default: NULL
     Extra: 
Privileges: select,insert,update,references
   Comment: 
*************************** 2. row ***************************
     Field: c
      Type: char(10)
 Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
      Null: YES
       Key: 
   Default: NULL
     Extra: 
Privileges: select,insert,update,references
   Comment: 
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)