Setting charset and collation on every query, is it neccessary and can I suppress it?

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
I do not what OS you are running, but with phpMyAdmin there is a default of latin1_swedish_ci when creating databases!

to see the database collation:
1) Click on the database then on the Operations tab
2) Look at the very bottom and see what the database collation is set to
3) If it is set to latin1_swedish_ci change it to either utf8_general_ci or utf8_unicode_ci
4) Click on the GO button on the far right to update your database collation.

InsiteFX