character_set variables on mysqld start

[Aida Jamak]

Is it possible to set character_set variables on mysqld start? I setup those variables, I even inserted init-connect='SET NAMES utf8' int my.cnf ([mysqld] section), but when I restart mysql, the variables are as they were before I set them to utf8.

I need this because I have an "on insert" trigger that, in some cases, inserts data in another table as well. The data that needs to be inserted is in utf8, and it gets inserted unless it contains special characters (č,š). When there is a special character, the rest of the string is ignored. If a special character is the first character of the string, an empty string gets inserted instead.

When I manually call procedures that the trigger calls, all strings are fine.

The default charset of the database is utf8 and the collation is utf8_bin.