Question

I am using Doctrine with Symfony2.
My config.yml file looks something like this:-

Doctrine Configuration

doctrine:
    dbal:
        driver: %database_driver%
        host: %database_host%
        port: %database_port%
        dbname: %database_name%
        user: %database_user%
        password: %database_password%
        charset: UTF8

Unfortunately my tables are not collating to the UTF8_general_ci or UTF8_unicode_ci
I tried

collate: utf8_unicode_ci

But Doctrine2 didn’t recognize the option.

How can I achieve the same?

Answer 1

The charset: UTF8 option is just useful to ask Doctrine to execute SET NAMES UTF-8 on each page. I don’t have any specific configuration for Doctrine, and my tables are by default in utf8_general_ci InnoDB.
Read this part of the documentation: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/faq.html#how-do-i-set-the-charset-and-collation-for-mysql-tables, it answers your question:

You can’t set these values inside the annotations, yml or xml mapping
files. To make a database work with the default charset and collation
you should configure MySQL to use it as default charset, or create the
database with charset and collation details. This way they get
inherited to all newly created database tables and columns.