change default collation in phpmyadmin

Question

It seems to me that phpMyAdmin imports tables by default with collation latin1_swedish_ci, how i change this?

Answer 1

know this is an old post. But the way i changed the default charset through phpMyAdmin was:

phpMyadmin main page > Variables tab (Server variables and settings) > searched for "character" and changed all variables from "latin1" to "utf8". (on a MAMP installation with phpMyAdmin v. 3.5.7)

And as the others said, this is the variables for MySQL and not some phpMyAdmin specific ones.