[Tutorial] Getting native emojis to work by changing the CHARACTER SET to utf8mb4 and COLLATION to utf8mb4_unicode_ci

So I finally got native emojis working on my site (posts/comments/messages etc) 🙂 and thought I should share it here in case anyone's also struggling (and even for me to look at it later). It's in continuation to [this thread](https://phuks.co/s/phuksdev/66541). **Assumptions and stuff:** 1. You must be logged in as root. 2. You'll be doing all your tasks in MySQL 3. Your database character set is anything another than **utf8mb4**. This could be **Latin 1** or **utf8** and the Collation is **utf8_general_ci** or **latin1_swedish_ci**. In my case, my **throat** database was **Latin1**. Use the following query to find that out for all the databases in your server: `SELECT SCHEMA_NAME 'database', default_character_set_name 'charset', DEFAULT_COLLATION_NAME 'collation' FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA;` [Sample result (pic)](https://i.imgur.com/TB7gotn.png) 4. ####Back up your database before running any of the following commands. That said, all you need to do is run the following commands one after the other (replace **throat** with the name of your Phuks database). Notice that we are altering the whole database PLUS the exsiting data in the `sub_post_comment`, `sub_post`, `sub`, and `message` tables. - `ALTER DATABASE throat CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec) - `SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) - `ALTER TABLE sub_post_comment CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 343 rows affected (0.10 sec) **Sample RESULT:** Records: 343 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 - `ALTER TABLE sub_post CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 244 rows affected (0.08 sec) **Sample RESULT:** Records: 244 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 - `ALTER TABLE sub CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 24 rows affected (0.03 sec) **Sample RESULT:** Records: 24 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 - `ALTER TABLE message CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 314 rows affected (0.09 sec) **Sample RESULT:** Records: 314 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 - `SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;` **Sample RESULT:** Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)