Collate information missing when converting a MySQL table from Latin1 to UTF8

Question

I'm converting an existing table such as this:

CREATE TABLE `example`(`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, 
                       `column1` char(32) COLLATE latin1_general_ci NOT NULL 
                           DEFAULT '',   
                       `column2` char(64) COLLATE latin1_general_ci NOT NULL 
                           DEFAULT '',
                       PRIMARY KEY (`id`)) 
              ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 
              DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci;

to utf8 using the following command:

ALTER TABLE example CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

This seems to work ok, but the resulting table doesn't include any collation information:

CREATE TABLE `example` (`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
                        `column1` char(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
                        `column2` char(64) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
                        PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
                        ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

So my question is, would the missing collate information be a problem? I searched google but couldn't find mention of this anywhere. My understanding of the collate flag is pretty basic ( it matters in some way when comparing the characters in string functions I think?)

thanks

Answer 1

The default collation for the utf8 charset is utf8_general_ci, so it's not displaying it.