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

Question

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 a

Answer 1

Change MySQL character:

Client

default-character-set=utf8

mysqld

character_set_server=utf8

We should not write default-character-set=utf8 in mysqld, because that could result in an error like:

start: Job failed to start

At last:

 +--------------------------+----------------------------+
 | 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/ |
 +--------------------------+----------------------------+