Setting Up Your UTF-8 Database PDF Print E-mail
Configuring your UTF-8 DatabaseIf you want your Joomla! International Edition website to fully function in UTF-8 it is important to set up your MySQL website properly BEFORE you install JIE. This task is quite simple to perform and only requires a couple minutes. Here we will go over two different ways to set up your MySQL database in UTF-8.

For MySQL to use the UTF capabilities it MUST be a version >= 4.1, versions lower than 4.1 do not fully support UTF-8 databases or tables.

Using phpMyAdmin

The first step in this process is to log into your phpMyAdmin account. At this point, depending on your needs, you may want to set your MySQL connection collation to UTF-8 if you want all your databases to be using UTF-8.

Change MySQL connection Collation

Next, from the left drop-down box select the database you want to change. Then click the "Operations" tab. At the bottom of the window there will be a box labeled "Collation", here you should select "utf8_unicode_ci" as the option and click "Go".

Select

Now the database has been changed to UTF-8 and you are ready to install JIE!

 

Using Command Line

Another way to make this change is to log into MySQL through the command line interface. To change your database to UTF-8 this way you simply need to do the following command: 

 
ALTER DATABASE `db_name` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

 

 

 
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