How to make MySQL handle UTF-8 properly

Question

One of the responses to a question I asked yesterday suggested that I should make sure my database can handle UTF-8 characters correctly. How I can do this with MySQL?

Answer 1

MySQL 4.1 and above has a default character set that it calls utf8 but which is actually only a subset of UTF-8 (allows only three-byte characters and smaller).

Use utf8mb4 as your charset if you want "full" UTF-8.