Doctrine2: How to set all tables to collate with UTF8

Question

I am using Doctrine with Symfony2. My config.yml file looks something like this:-

Doctrine Configuration

doctrine:
    dbal:
        driver: %data         


        

Answer 1

UPDATE:

See Symfony3.1 book for reference (click here):

Also notice the use of utf8mb4 instead of plain utf8. ("Symfony recommends utf8mb4 against MySQL's utf8 character set, since it does not support 4-byte unicode characters, and strings containing them will be truncated. This is fixed by the newer utf8mb4 character set.")

Setting UTF8 defaults for MySQL is as simple as adding a few lines to your configuration file (typically my.cnf):

[mysqld]
# Version 5.5.3 introduced "utf8mb4", which is recommended
collation-server     = utf8mb4_general_ci # Replaces utf8_general_ci
character-set-server = utf8mb4            # Replaces utf8

You can also change the defaults for Doctrine so that the generated SQL uses the correct character set.

# app/config/config.yml
doctrine:
    dbal:
        charset: utf8mb4
        default_table_options:
            charset: utf8mb4
            collate: utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Answer 2

You can refer to the documentation here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-applications.html if you are using ORMs like Doctrine.

Particularly: adding/editing the [mysqld] block in your my.cnf (usually found in /etc/my.cnf or xampp/mysql/my.cnf)

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci