To show the MySQL default character set you have to login to the MySQL console and execute SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | latin1 |
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| character_set_database | latin1 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | latin1 |
| character_set_server | latin1 |
| character_set_system | latin1 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.01 sec)
If you want to change it for example to uft8 you have to add this
default-character-set = utf8
to the client, mysqld_safe, mysqld and mysqldump section (may differ depending on configuration) in your my.cnf and restart the mysql daemon.
Note: For MySQL > 5.6 default-character-set is not valid and you need to use character-set-server instead. Check you error log if mysql start leads to a timeout.
After this check if the default character set changed
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | utf8 |
| character_set_connection | utf8 |
| character_set_database | utf8 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8 |
| character_set_server | utf8 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.01 sec)
It should all changed to utf8 or you have forgotten something.
You can check the default collation with SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE CHARSET = 'utf8';
mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE CHARSET = 'utf8';
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
36 rows in set (0.00 sec)
If your character set is utf8 your default collation is utf8_general_ci.
