default charset and collation sequence

must it be swedish?

[Mutley2003]

Hi
new to mysql and php. I have been trying to figure out what charsets and collation sequences I need.

For some reason phpmyadmin (running on my local machine) insists on giving me defaults of latin1_swedish and I can't seem to tell it how to give me something else as default.

The problem with the swedish is that a query involving LIKE

eg select * from dogbreeds where breedname like '%beagl%

seems to fail with latin1_swedish . But if I change all the columns to UTF_8 it works OK.

So, my question

a) is there any reason why I should not use UTF-8 as the default?

b) any clues as to how I can make phpMyAdmin or mysqlAdministrator see that as the default for each table and the database?

thanks

[vincevincevince]

Absolutely no reason not to use UTF-8 that I know of. Remember you may well get multibyte characters in your strings....

Regarding your management packages - try downloading a new copy built by a brit or an american ... ehh