<div id="docs-body">
 <div class="section">
  <div class="titlepage">
   <div>
    <div>
     <h3 class="title">
      <a name="charset-unicode-ucs2">
      </a>
      12.9.4 The ucs2 Character Set (UCS-2 Unicode Encoding)
     </h3>
    </div>
   </div>
  </div>
  <a class="indexterm" name="idm46045216597408">
  </a>
  <div class="note" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in;">
   <div class="admon-title">
    Note
   </div>
   <p>
    The
    <code class="literal">
     ucs2
    </code>
    character set is deprecated;
          expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. You should
          use
    <code class="literal">
     utf8mb4
    </code>
    instead.
   </p>
  </div>
  <p>
   In UCS-2, every character is represented by a 2-byte Unicode
        code with the most significant byte first. For example:
   <code class="literal">
    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
   </code>
   has the code
   <code class="literal">
    0x0041
   </code>
   and it is stored as a 2-byte sequence:
   <code class="literal">
    0x00 0x41
   </code>
   .
   <code class="literal">
    CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER
        YERU
   </code>
   (Unicode
   <code class="literal">
    0x044B
   </code>
   ) is stored as
        a 2-byte sequence:
   <code class="literal">
    0x04 0x4B
   </code>
   . For Unicode
        characters and their codes, please refer to the
   <a class="ulink" href="http://www.unicode.org/" target="_blank">
    Unicode Consortium
        website
   </a>
   .
  </p>
  <p>
   The
   <code class="literal">
    ucs2
   </code>
   character set has these
        characteristics:
  </p>
  <div class="itemizedlist">
   <ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; ">
    <li class="listitem">
     <p>
      Supports BMP characters only (no support for supplementary
            characters)
     </p>
    </li>
    <li class="listitem">
     <p>
      Uses a fixed-length 16-bit encoding and requires two bytes
            per character.
     </p>
    </li>
   </ul>
  </div>
 </div>
 <br/>
</div>
