Syntax:
SHOW CHARACTER SET
    [LIKE 'pattern' | WHERE expr]

The SHOW CHARACTER SET statement shows all available character sets.
The LIKE clause, if present, indicates which character set names to
match. The WHERE clause can be given to select rows using more general
conditions, as discussed in
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/extended-show.html. For example:

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET LIKE 'latin%';
+---------+-----------------------------+-------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description                 | Default collation | Maxlen |
+---------+-----------------------------+-------------------+--------+
| latin1  | cp1252 West European        | latin1_swedish_ci |      1 |
| latin2  | ISO 8859-2 Central European | latin2_general_ci |      1 |
| latin5  | ISO 8859-9 Turkish          | latin5_turkish_ci |      1 |
| latin7  | ISO 8859-13 Baltic          | latin7_general_ci |      1 |
+---------+-----------------------------+-------------------+--------+

URL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/show-character-set.html

