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 as the default setting in MySQL. Can we do this in /etc/my.cnf or in another location?
SET NAMES 'utf8'
SET CHARACTER SET utf8
I've looked for a default charset in /etc/my.cnf, but there's nothing there about charsets.
At this point, I did the following to set the MySQL charset and collation variables to UTF-8:
skip-character-set-client-handshake
character_set_client=utf8
character_set_server=utf8
Is that a correct way to handle this?
Best Answer
To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf/my.ini
If you want to change the character set for an existing DB, let me know... your question didn't specify it directly so I am not sure if that's what you want to do.
Edit: I replaced
utf8
withutf8mb4
in the original answer due toutf8
only being a subset of UTF-8. MySQL and MariaDB both call UTF-8utf8mb4
.