title: Adding a column for UTF-8 content in MySQL
body: <p>Anybody has ideas, how to add a column meant for storing UTF-8 content in MySQL?</p>
  
  <p>I tried the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER TABLE tname ADD COLUMN cname TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci IF NOT EXISTS;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That gives an error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the
    manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right
    syntax to use near 'if not exists' at line 1</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><br>
  I want to add a new <em>column</em> with UTF-8 encoding.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>