title: Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf?
body: <p>Currently we are using the following commands in PHP to set the character set to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" rel="noreferrer">UTF-8</a> in our application. </p>
  
  <p>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?</p>
  
  <pre><code>SET NAMES 'utf8'
  SET CHARACTER SET utf8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've looked for a default charset in /etc/my.cnf, but there's nothing there about charsets.</p>
  
  <p>At this point, I did the following to set the MySQL charset and collation variables to UTF-8:</p>
  
  <pre><code>skip-character-set-client-handshake
  character_set_client=utf8
  character_set_server=utf8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is that a correct way to handle this?</p>