My DB needs to hold strings containing foreign language characters such that; User enters string into form, form submitted and string added to DB, string will be displayed on page for viewing. I would like to use UTF8 as this will be able to handle all of the required languages.

Currently I believe my DB is set to 'latin1' but webpages are capable of displaying correct charachters anyways. Problems arise when trying to set textareas to hold foreign charachters and when viewing DB via command-line.

How can I implement this most effectively? My plan was to blitz the whole site such that:DB Charset is UTF8 and web pages charset is UTF8. Could someone give me the minimal commands on how to do this so I don't end up duplicating things (Having "UTF8" commands everywhere when I really just need one) and making things too difficult to control. Newbie Thanks