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phpMyAdmin has a box on its main page for setting the "Server connection collation". Mine is set to the default, "utf8mb4_general_ci", which is what I want. (It gives the UTF-8 character set with variable-width encoding of one to four bytes.) The "Databases" page has a box for selecting the collation of a new database. But when a new database is created automatically upon the addition of a new user, there is nowhere to select the collation of the new db. I don't see anywhere else (such as on the Settings pages) for choosing a collation in phpMyAdmin and I don't see anywhere for changing the collation of an existing db.

I set up my first Drupal site today on my local machine. I'm pretty sure that when I looked before, phpMyAdmin reported that the collation for the site database was "utf8_general_ci", which is the previous standard and is inferior to "utf8mb4_general_ci". I was originally going to ask what to do about that.

But I just took another look and now phpMyAdmin is reporting that the database collation is "latin1_swedish_ci". Pardon me, but WTF?

In the list of databases, "test" also has the Swedish collation and the collation named on the "Total" row of the list is also the Swedish collation. I had noticed that collation in the list before and was puzzled by it. But now I'm concerned because it has become the collation of my site db, which is not likely to give me behavior that I want.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? More specifically and more importantly,
(a) How do I tell phpMyAdmin to create new dbs with the "utf8mb4_general_ci" collation?
(b) How do I change the collation of an existing db?

Thank you.
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phpMyAdmin v 4.2.11
Server version: 5.6.21 - MySQL Community Server (GPL)
Both installed with XAMPP v 5.6.3 under Windows 7

a) Create the database manually (not automatically after creating a new user)

b) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5906 ... a-database

NewSites wrote:(a) How do I tell phpMyAdmin to create new dbs with the "utf8mb4_general_ci" collation?

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en ... tions.html

NewSites wrote:(b) How do I change the collation of an existing db?

unspecific. A database has a default character set which can be set in the operations tab of the database.
If you already have database tables you need to change their character set too
If you have any data in your database tables, you need to convert them.

I was wrong. As pointed out by Altrea, the collation can be changed in phpMyAdmin in:
Databases > [database name] > Operations
As long as I do that right after the table is created, there should be no issue with existing data.