phpMyAdmin problem

[ben_brown30]

I have used phpMyAdmin for a while but having recently moved to Bluehost some new columns have appeared on my tables named "collation"

My problem is that the "collation" is defaulting to "latin1_swedish_ci". What should this value be set to for an english language site that may occasionally want to display some accented characters? Also how do you set the default value for this - is it a per database setting or is it something on the server?

Thanks in advance!

[macgyver2]

latin1_swedish_ci is the just default (I don't know why) and it will work fine for English sites, even with accented characters. The collation setting is used for sorting...if you want to correctly sort spanish letters, then you set it to a spanish collation, and so on. In addition, the default collation setting can be overridden in a query anyway.

As for how to set it, you can choose to set the default at most levels.

Take a look at this chapter (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset.html) in the docs.

[ben_brown30]

Many Thanks - that explains things!

[Quasaur]

OK, i obviously missed something...

When I use "MySQL Databases" in the BlueHost control panel to create a database (since the phpMyAdmin doesn't allow me to create databases) how do I get to create the collation of my choice??