Hello, Just sharing my experience here. To configure mysql to support utf8 as default, init-connect='SET NAMES utf8' character-set-server=utf8 collation-server=utf8_general_ci character_set_client=utf8 With these, I get these as variables in mysql: mysql> show variables like "char%"; +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | character_set_client | latin1 | | character_set_connection | latin1 | | character_set_database | utf8 | | character_set_filesystem | binary | | character_set_results | latin1 | | character_set_server | utf8 | | character_set_system | utf8 | | character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ 8 rows in set (0.00 sec) Further I added the following lines in /etc/mysql/my.cnf (in the respective stanzas as shown below): [client] default-character-set=utf8 [mysql] default-character-set=utf8 [mysqld_safe] default-character-set=utf8 [mysqld] default-character-set=utf8 and restarted mysql. I then got the following set variables in mysql (as root): 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) So looks like specifying the default char sets helped. If others have insights in to this, please share. I am not experienced in mysql so I do not know all the details about the factors affecting char sets in mysql in various situations. Thanks. -- Please reply to this list only. I read this list on its corresponding newsgroup on gmane.org. Replies sent to my email address are just filtered to a folder in my mailbox and get periodically deleted without ever having been read.