COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'

Question

I am trying to fix a character encoding issue - previously we had the collation set for this column utf8_general_ci which caused issues because it is accent insensitive..

Answer 1

Firstly run this query

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';

You have character_set_server='latin1'

If so,go into your config file,my.cnf and add or uncomment these lines:

character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci

Restart the server. Yes late to the party,just encountered the same issue.