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

To change the character set encoding to UTF-8 for the database itself, type the following command at the mysql> prompt. USE ALTER DATABASE.. Replace DBNAME with the database name:

ALTER DATABASE DBNAME CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

This is a duplicate of this question How to convert an entire MySQL database characterset and collation to UTF-8?