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

The charset is a property of the database (default) and the table. You can have a look (MySQL commands):

show create database foo; 
> CREATE DATABASE  `foo`.`foo` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 */

show create table foo.bar;
> lots of stuff ending with
> ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=252 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

In other words; it's quite easy to check your database charset or change it:

ALTER TABLE `foo`.`bar` CHARACTER SET utf8;