When installing Mysql on Ubuntu the default character set is probably latin-1. Since Ubuntu uses UTF-8 for most other things this may be little strange. But it is easy to change.
The Mysql configuration file
/etc/mysql/my.cnf has a magic line:!includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/
This will make it include settings on the subdirectory
conf.d. It's not recommended to change themy.cnf file directly since it will cause problems when upgrading Ubuntu/Mysql to a new version.Create a new file:
/etc/mysql/conf.d/utf8_charset.cnf with the following contents:
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake
[client]
default-character-set=utf8
Restart mysql and you will have UTF-8 as character set:
$ mysql -u root -p -e 'show variables like "%character%";show variables like "%collation%"';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| 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/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
+----------------------+-----------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+----------------------+-----------------+
| collation_connection | utf8_unicode_ci |
| collation_database | utf8_unicode_ci |
| collation_server | utf8_unicode_ci |
+----------------------+-----------------+
if you want to change the DB
alter database <database> character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci;
