MYSQL Column Collations: Difference between latin1 and latin2

Question

I was currently setting up a database for a webpage when I ran over the Column Collations latin1 and latin2 in PhpMyAdmin. After research on the difference, the only thing I found was that latin1 is for west-europeans and latin2 for central-europeans. What´s the difference in the charset, though?

Answer 1

The Charset is what is different. The Collation is the ordering of the characters; since there are different characters in the two charsets, it is not relevant to talk about differences in collation.

First pick latin1 or latin2 based on what characters you need. (Better yet, pick utf8 so you can get both sets of characters.) Second, pick the collation desired. (Often, the default collation is "good enough".)