[Old Pedant]

By the by, if you have an existing table that has been specified wrongly, you *CAN* alter it.

How to tell? Use the SHOW CREATE TABLE yourtablename; command.

It will dump out the table and show you the CHARSET default for the entire table and the character set of each field, if different than the table default.

For example:

mysql> show create table xxx;
+-------+----------------------------------------
| Table | Create Table
+-------+----------------------------------------
| xxx   | CREATE TABLE `xxx` (
  `name` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
  `email` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+-------+----------------------------------------

Okay, so that table has two fields and both use the DEFAULT for the table character set of "latin1".

So I can do:

mysql> alter table xxx modify name varchar(100) charset utf8;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> show create table xxx;
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------
| Table | Create Table
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------
| xxx   | CREATE TABLE `xxx` (
  `name` varchar(100) CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT NULL,
  `email` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------

See? The table still defaults to "latin1"--and that means the EMAIL field will be "latin1". But the NAME field is now UTF8 and so can hold Unicode characters.

Easy with MySQL!