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

[10 Dec 2004 15:57] Struchkov Vladimir
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:
[15 Feb 2006 13:00] Valeriy Kravchuk
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.
[3 Oct 2008 16:49] Konstantin Osipov
Hello Vova,

Starting from 5.0 you can use INFORMATION_SCHEMA.
[3 Oct 2008 23:15] Paul DuBois
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)