MySQL: Change Default Character Set or Default Collation in phpMyAdmin

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It can be annoying when MySQL imports your UTF8 database (which contains exotic characters other than those in English) in the default character set of latin1_swedish_ci, jeopardizing the text content. It is also annoying when phpMyAdmin does the same and when you forgot to set the collation to utf8_general_ci for the new database which is very probably going to store utf8 characters.

Let’s fix this once and for all.

Just locate and open the MySQL configuration file my.ini and find the section [mysqld]. Add the following directive:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci

Save to my.ini and restart MySQL demon. Now MySQL will use utf8 as the default character set when importing databases or creating new databases. The default collation of phpMyAdmin has also changed to utf8_general_ci.