can i change the default encoding of my mysql server from latin-1 to utf-8 ?

Question

can i change the default encoding of my mysql server on my computer from latin-1 to utf-8 ?

Answer 1

sure you can. you can use your mysql gui software or run following quries:

// utf8 charset for multi-lingual support
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");
mysql_query("SET character_set_results=utf8");
mb_language("uni");
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");

Answer 2

assuming you are working with PHP the answer from sarfraz is correct. You need to be aware of a number of other issues though such as changes to your actual code, header outputs, html charsets and many other things. A number of these things are discussed here