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 Section 19.28, “Extensions to SHOW Statements”. 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 |
+---------+-----------------------------+-------------------+--------+

The Maxlen column shows the maximum number of bytes required to store one character.