Basic unicode UTF-8 multilingual questions?

[Marris]

I am setting up a new forum that will be primarily English, but I would like to enable foreign language encoding to allow posts in foreign languages.

Do I need to create the database / collation in UTF-8 or can I simply change the forum HTML language encoding to UTF-8?

Here on vbulletin.com, the source shows charset="ISO-8859-1" , but I still see foreign scripts used in posts.

Is the UTF-8 encoding setting not needed to enable posts in foreign characters?

Finally, if I do set the MySQL db collation and HTML language to UTF-8, will this cause any issues with the search function or parsing?

Any advice is appreciated.

[sonnen]

i have also this question.

thanks 谢谢

[asasi]

and I need this change.
my forums database charset is Arabic-windows (windows-1256) I want change it to UTF-8 ...
my db is about 600 MB I cant open it whith editor. its not a way?