MySQL Encoding Intermediate

UTF-8 encoding: store international characters

Set UTF-8 encoding for databases, tables, and columns to support international characters (accents, emoji, CJK).

UnderHost NOC Network Operations

9 min read Updated June 2026

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What is UTF-8?
Why UTF-8 matters
Check encoding
Set UTF-8 encoding
Convert existing tables

UTF-8 is the universal character encoding supporting all languages, accents, emoji, and special characters. Modern applications should always use UTF-8.

Why UTF-8 matters

Without UTF-8:

Accented characters (é, ñ, ü) display as ??? or garbled text
Asian characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) won't display
Emoji show as corrupted characters
International domain names (IDN) display incorrectly

Check current encoding

SHOW CREATE DATABASE mydatabase\G  # Check database collation
SHOW CREATE TABLE mytable\G  # Check table collation
SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM mytable;  # Check column collation

Set UTF-8 when creating

Create database with UTF-8

CREATE DATABASE mydatabase CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Create table with UTF-8

CREATE TABLE users (
  id INT PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(100) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci
) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Convert existing tables to UTF-8

ALTER DATABASE mydatabase CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Use utf8mb4, not utf8

MySQL's "utf8" is limited to 3 bytes and doesn't support emoji. Always use utf8mb4 for full UTF-8 support.

Related: Database administration

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