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Most weirdly, the fact that the default collation is SWEDISH. It is a complete freak show,

Unless you're Swedish, I imagine. Then it's quite handy.

I believe the author of MySQL was Swedish, so to me it all makes sense. It also provides a learning opportunity for people who believe the entire planet operates on ASCII.

MySQL being a Swedish company, the default collation for MySQL was (is?) latin1_swedish_ci.

But... why would you not just set the correct collation?