title: Encoding in MySQL with french accents
body: <p>I've got a database containing a list of french word with accents.</p>
  
  <p>My problem is that when I try "select length("é")" it always returns 2. So if I need to get all words with 7 letters, it will never work.</p>
  
  <p>I tried the following :</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER DATABASE my_database CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin
  ALTER TABLE my_table CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it did not change anything. I also tried with latin1/latin1_bin and utf16/utf16_bin, no change.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>