Full UTF-8 Web Application Development - How to Do It Right

With UTF-8 support, you can be guaranteed that any language will work with your code. But there are two fundamental things that you need to make sure happens:

First, convert your database to UTF-8. This is the data part of it.

To convert your database requires changing the default settings and converting the tables themselves. You can change the default settings with...

MyDB@sys mysql> ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

And you can convert your tables with...

MyDB@sys mysql> ALTER TABLE MyTable DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
MyDB@sys mysql> ALTER TABLE MyTable MODIFY MyColumn VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

Second, send all web pages with a UTF-8 header. This is the networking part of it.

For example, in PHP, to send the UTF-8 header, you will run this command being sending any output to the browser...

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Every program, protocol, etc., has its exceptions and variations, so these are just the two basics you need to handle.