How to make MySQL handle UTF-8 properly

Question

One of the responses to a question I asked yesterday suggested that I should make sure my database can handle UTF-8 characters correctly. How I can do this with MySQL?

Answer 1

To change the character set encoding to UTF-8 for the database itself, type the following command at the mysql> prompt. USE ALTER DATABASE.. Replace DBNAME with the database name:

ALTER DATABASE DBNAME CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

This is a duplicate of this question How to convert an entire MySQL database characterset and collation to UTF-8?

Answer 2

MySQL 4.1 and above has a default character set that it calls utf8 but which is actually only a subset of UTF-8 (allows only three-byte characters and smaller).

Use utf8mb4 as your charset if you want "full" UTF-8.

Answer 3

Set your database connection to UTF8:

  if($handle = @mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASS)){          
         //set to utf8 encoding
         mysql_set_charset('utf8',$handle);
  }

Answer 4

SET NAMES UTF8

This is does the trick

Answer 5

I followed Javier's solution, but I added some different lines in my.cnf:

[myslqd]
skip-character-set-client-handshake
collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci
character_set_server=utf8 

I found this idea here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-server.html in the first/only user comment on the bottom of the page. He mentions that skip-character-set-client-handshake has some importance.

Answer 6

To make this 'permanent', in my.cnf:

[client]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
character-set-server = utf8

To check, go to the client and show some variables:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';

Verify that they're all utf8, except ..._filesystem, which should be binary and ..._dir, that points somewhere in the MySQL installation.