Effective character sets and collations

On the home page, we can see the MySQL charset information and a MySQL connection collation selector. Here is the MySQL charset information:

The character set information (as seen here after MySQL charset) is used to generate HTML information, which tells the browser what is the page's character set.

We can also choose which character set and collation will be used for our connection to the MySQL server using the MySQL connection collation dialog. This is passed to the MySQL server. MySQL then transforms the characters that will be sent to our browser into this character set. MySQL also interprets what it receives from the browser according to the character set information. Remember that all tables and columns have a character set information describing how their data is encoded.

Normally, the default value should work. However, if we are entering some characters using a different character set, we can choose the proper character set in this dialog.

The following parameter defines both the default connection collation and character set:

$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_unicode_ci';