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

Currently we are using the 开发者_如何转开发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?

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.

For the recent version of MySQL,

default-character-set = utf8

causes a problem. It's deprecated I think.

As Justin Ball says in "Upgrade to MySQL 5.5.12 and now MySQL won’t start, you should:

1. Remove that directive and you should be good.

2. Then your configuration file ('/etc/my.cnf' for example) should look like that:

   [mysqld]
   collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
   init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
   character-set-server = utf8
   

3. Restart MySQL.

4. For making sure, your MySQL is UTF-8, run the following queries in your MySQL prompt:

   • First query:

      mysql> show variables like 'char%';
     

     The output should look like:

      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
      | Variable_name            | Value                           |
      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
      | character_set_client     | utf8                            |
      | character_set_connection | utf8                            |
      | character_set_database   | utf8                            |
      | character_set_filesystem | binary                          |
      | character_set_results    | utf8                            |
      | character_set_server     | utf8                            |
      | character_set_system     | utf8                            |
      | character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/mysql/share/charsets/|
      +--------------------------+---------------------------------+
     

   • Second query:

      mysql> show variables like 'collation%';
     

     And the query output is:

      +----------------------+-----------------+
      | Variable_name        | Value           |
      +----------------------+-----------------+
      | collation_connection | utf8_general_ci |
      | collation_database   | utf8_unicode_ci |
      | collation_server     | utf8_unicode_ci |
      +----------------------+-----------------+
     

This question already has a lot of answers, but Mathias Bynens mentioned that 'utf8mb4' should be used instead of 'utf8' in order to have better UTF-8 support ('utf8' does not support 4 byte characters, fields are truncated on insert). I consider this to be an important difference. So here is yet another answer on how to set the default character set and collation. One that'll allow you to insert a pile of poo (