Hi greenman,
can you update me on what is the status of this option?

I am not sure about the good documentation to follow.
I am working on this https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879099 and it seems that on stable debian (10.1.26-0+deb9u1), "mysqlbinlog" now needs "character-sets-dir"...

And the default deployed option seems to be wrong '/etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-client.cnf':
<code>
$ sudo apt install mariadb-server
$ sudo mysqlbinlog
mysqlbinlog: unknown variable 'default-character-set=utf8mb4'
</code>

Faustin

It looks like this option has never been supported by mysqlbinlog: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/mysqlbinlog-options. As you say, character-sets-dir is used.

Ok, as discussed with Otto, this is my suggestion.

I think problem is in mysqlbinlog binary that should handle correctly default options as other mysql clients are. It has a '--set-charset=name' option from CLI so it should be able to read it from default client setting conf. But my C skills are not sufficient to handle this.
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/mysqlbinlog-options

On upstream 10.1 and 10.3 this option is commented so mysqlbinlog does not complain. But if uncommented, it exit as in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879099