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Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf?

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?
character-encoding mysql
by

2 Answers

aashaykumar
To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf/my.ini


[client]

default-character-set=utf8mb4



[mysql]

default-character-set=utf8mb4





[mysqld]

collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci

init-connect='SET NAMES utf8mb4'

character-set-server = utf8mb4

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 with utf8mb4 in the original answer due to utf8 only being a subset of UTF-8. MySQL and MariaDB both call UTF-8 utf8mb4.
RoliMishra
On MySQL 5.5 I have in my.cnf

[mysqld] 

init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci' 

init_connect='SET NAMES utf8' 

character-set-server=utf8 

collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci 

skip-character-set-client-handshake

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