title: What is the best collation to use for MySQL with PHP?
body: <p>I'm wondering if there is a "best" choice for collation in MySQL for a general website where you aren't 100% sure of what will be entered? I understand that all the encodings should be the same, such as MySQL, Apache, the HTML and anything inside PHP.</p>
  
  <p>In the past I have set PHP to output in "UTF-8", but which collation does this match in MySQL? I'm thinking it's one of the UTF-8 ones, but I have used <code>utf8_unicode_ci</code>, <code>utf8_general_ci</code>, and <code>utf8_bin</code> before.</p>