I often see something similar to this below in PHP scripts using MySQL

query("SET NAMES utf8");

I have never had to do this for any project yet so I have a couple basic questions about it.

  1. Is this something that is done with PDO only?
  2. If it is not a PDO specific thing, then what is the purpose of doing it? I realize it is setting the encoding for mysql but I mean, I have never had to use it so why would I want to use it?
php mysql utf-8
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