Few webmasters come asking such questions wherein they have a requirement to change the MySQL collation to overcome issues related to encoding of foreign characters. The best method to do it is make amendments to the MySQL collation from ‘latin1‘ to ‘utf8‘.
Below is the procedure to change MySQL database collation in phpMyAdmin:
- Login to cPanel control panel
- Go to the phpMyAdmin
- Choose the database for which you intend to make the changes
- Hit the ‘Operations’ option
- On this page, you should be able to located the ‘Collation‘ option
- You can see a drop-down menu, here you need to choose the collation type
- Hit ‘Go‘
One must take into account that, this would only make changes to the collation of your database for all the newly created or upcoming tables, while the previous would be left as-it-was.
Note: Before making any changes, it is strongly advisable to maintain the latest back-up of the database.
To learn the procedure to take backup of your database, please visit : How to Take MySQL Backups with phpMyAdmin