GET charset with mysql PDO

Question

Is there a way of retrieving the current character set with PDO? I used to have a little test with Mysqli to check if the forced character set was set by retrieving it like

Answer 1

If you want the actual charset (not collation) you can do this:

$charset = $pdo->query("SELECT CHARSET('')")->fetchColumn();
if($charset === 'utf8mb4') {
    $charset = 'utf8';
}

I put the utf8mb4 check in there because it's not compatible with PHP's mb_ functions.