change mysql default character set to UTF8 in my.cnf?

Question

currently we are using following commands in PHP to set the character set to UTF8 in our application.

Since this is a bit of overhead, we'd like to set this as the default setting in mysql. Can we do this in /etc/my.cnf or in another location?

SET NAMES 'utf8'
SET CHARACTER SET utf8

I've looked for a default charset in /etc/my.cnf but there's nothing there about charsets.

Thanks a lot for helping out!

at this point, I did the following to set the mysql charset and collation variables to UTF8:

skip-character-set-client-handshake
character_set_client=utf8
character_set_server=utf8

is that a correct way to handle this?

Answer 1

To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8


[mysqld]
default-character-set = utf8    
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8

If you want to change the character set for an existing DB, let me know... your question didn't specify it directly so I am not sure if that's what you want to do.