Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf?

Question

Currently we are using the following commands in PHP to set the character set to UTF-8 in our application.

Since this is a bit of overhead, we\'d like to set this a

Answer 1

For the recent version of MySQL,

default-character-set = utf8

causes a problem. It's deprecated I think.

As Justin Ball says in "Upgrade to MySQL 5.5.12 and now MySQL won’t start, you should:

1. Remove that directive and you should be good.

2. Then your configuration file ('/etc/my.cnf' for example) should look like that:

   [mysqld]
   collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
   init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
   character-set-server = utf8
   

3. Restart MySQL.

4. For making sure, your MySQL is UTF-8, run the following queries in your MySQL prompt:

   • First query:

      mysql> show variables like 'char%';
     

     The output should look like:

      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
      | Variable_name            | Value                           |
      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
      | character_set_client     | utf8                            |
      | character_set_connection | utf8                            |
      | character_set_database   | utf8                            |
      | character_set_filesystem | binary                          |
      | character_set_results    | utf8                            |
      | character_set_server     | utf8                            |
      | character_set_system     | utf8                            |
      | character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/mysql/share/charsets/|
      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
     

   • Second query:

      mysql> show variables like 'collation%';
     

     And the query output is:

      +----------------------+-----------------+
      | Variable_name        | Value           |
      +----------------------+-----------------+
      | collation_connection | utf8_general_ci |
      | collation_database   | utf8_unicode_ci |
      | collation_server     | utf8_unicode_ci |
      +----------------------+-----------------+