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 versions and Linux distributions may matter when making configurations.

However, the changes under [mysqld] section is encouraged.

I want to give a short explanation of tomazzlender's answer:

[mysqld] 
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci' 
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8' 
character-set-server=utf8 
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci 
skip-character-set-client-handshake

[mysqld]

This will change collation_connection to utf8_unicode_ci

init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci'

Using SET NAMES:

init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'

The SET NAMES will influence three characters, that is:

character_set_client
character_set_results
character_set_connection

This will set character_set_database & character_set_server

character-set-server=utf8

This will only affect collation_database & collation_server

collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci

Sorry, I'm not so sure what is this for. I don't use it however:

skip-character-set-client-handshake