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

MySQL v5.5.3 and greater:

Just add three lines only in the [mysqld] section:

[mysqld]
character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake

Note: Including skip-character-set-client-handshake here obviates the need to include both init-connect in [mysqld] and default-character-set in the [client] and [mysql] sections.