MySQL illegal mix of collations when everything is collated the same

Question

I can run this query in MySQL and it works just fine. BUT, I need to do a LEFT function on ctd.FULL_DESCRIPTION (TEXT datatype) and take just the first 3600 characters and when

Answer 1

The issue was the system variable collation_connection was set to latin1_swedish_ci and everything else was utf8_general_ci. Setting collation_connection to utf8_general_ci allowed the query to run successfully.