How can I change the character set for MySQL to utf8?

To set the MySQL character set to utf8, you can follow these steps:

1. Open the configuration file my.cnf for MySQL. You can find the my.ini file in the installation directory on Windows, and usually in /etc/mysql/my.cnf or /etc.cnf on Linux.
2. Add or modify the following lines in the [mysqld] section:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

This will set the default character set for the MySQL server to utf8, and use utf8_general_ci collation.

1. Save and close the configuration file.
2. Restart the MySQL service.

After completing the above steps, the character set of the MySQL server will be set to utf8.