Varchar Encoding in MySQL

Question

I am coming to MySQL from MS SQL. It was my understanding that in order to store International Characters, I need to declare a field as varchar with UTF-8 character set.

I am using Sequel Pro to develop MySQL database. When I manually enter international characters into a field in my table, it does not understand it and turns it into questions marks (?????).

Could someone please point me into the right direction?

Answer 1

Simple example,

ALTER TABLE t MODIFY col1 CHAR(50) CHARACTER SET utf8;

Source: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-conversion.html