CodeseniorSoftware Tutorials

To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf or my.ini for Windows

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

If you want to change the character set for an existing DB, you can use following code:

ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;