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Why is my output changing?

I work with UTF-8 encoding in PHP, and I continue to control the output the way I want. And then when nothing happens to the code, the result suddenly changes.

I used to get Hebrew. Now I get "& &&& &".

Any ideas what could be causing this?

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4 answers

These are the most common problems:

  • Your editor creating PHP / HTML files in
  • The web browser that you view on your site through
  • Your PHP web application running on a web server
  • MySQL database
  • In other places where you read / write data from (memcached, API, RSS feeds, etc.)

And a few things you can try:

Customize Your Editor

Make sure your text editor, IDE, or something else that you are writing PHP code saves your files in UTF-8 format. Your FTP client, scp, SFTP client does not need any special UTF-8 settings.

Make sure web browsers know how to use UTF-8

To make sure that all your user browsers know that you need to read / write all data in the form of UTF-8, you can set this in two places.

Content Type Tag

Make sure the META header of the content type indicates UTF-8 as a character set similar to this:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

HTTP response headers

Verify that the Content-Type response header also indicates UTF-8 as a character set as follows:

 ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8')

MySQL connection setup

Now you know that all the data received from users in UTF-8 format, we need to configure the client connection between PHP and the MySQL database. Theres a general way to do it by simply executing a MySQL query:

 SET NAMES utf8;

... and depending on which client / driver you use, there are helper functions to make this easier:

With built-in mysql functions

 mysql_set_charset('utf8', $link);

With MySQLi

 $mysqli->set_charset("utf8")

* With PDO_MySQL (when connected) *

 $pdo = new PDO( 'mysql:host=hostname;dbname=defaultDbName', 'username', 'password', array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8") );

MySQL database

Currently there are quite a lot, you just need to make sure that MySQL knows how to store data in your tables as UTF-8. You can check their encoding by looking at the Collation value at the SHOW TABLE STATUS output (in phpmyadmin this is shown in the list of tables). If your tables are not already in UTF-8 (probably theyre in latin1), you will need to convert them by running the following command for each table:

 ALTER TABLE myTable CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Last thing to watch out for

Now that all these steps are complete, your application should be free from character set problems. There is one thing to keep in mind, most PHP string functions are not unicode, so for example, if you run strlen () on a multibyte character, itll returns the number of bytes in the input, not the number of characters. You can get around this using the Multibyte String PHP extension, although it is not so common for these byte / character problems to cause problems.

Taken here: http://webmonkeyuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/how-to-avoid-character-encoding-problems-in-php/

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Try setting the content type using header as follows

 header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
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Try this feature →

 $html = "Bla Bla Bla..."; $html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");

for more - http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php

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I compiled this method and named it in the file I'm working with, and this seems to have solved the problem.

 function setutf_8() { header('content-type: text/html; charset: utf-8'); mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8'); mb_http_output('UTF-8'); mb_http_input('UTF-8'); mb_language('uni'); mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8'); ob_start('mb_output_handler'); }

Thank you for your help! :)

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