change default collation in phpmyadmin

Question

It seems to me that phpMyAdmin imports tables by default with collation latin1_swedish_ci, how i change this?

Answer 1

For Linux:

1. You need to have access to the MySQL config file.
   The location can vary from /etc/mysql/my.cnf to ~/my.cnf (user directory).

2. Add the following lines in the section [mysqld]:

   collation_server = utf8_unicode_ci
   character_set_server=utf8
   

3. Restart the server:

   service mysqld restart