How can I change my MySQL collation in WAMPSERVER

Question

How can I change my MySQL collation in WAMPSERVER from latin1_swedish_ci to UTF-8 because I think my HTML special characters are getting all messed up

Answer 1

You could use

set names 'utf8'

each time you open a connection.

Or add the following line to your my.ini file and restart your server.

default-character-set=utf8

If you've already got tables set up you'll need to alter them too you can alter them with:

ALTER TABLE tablename COLLATE utf8_general_ci

etc or pop into phpmyadmin and do it there. Remember if you alter database collation it'll only affect new tables created after that not pre-existing ones in that database already, so you will need to alter them also.

Answer 2

put in your C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\my.ini:

character-set-server=utf8    
collation-server=utf8_general_ci