Hello, I am trying to get an arab string $html = 'ل مسؤول أميركي رفيع إن الرئيس الأميركي جورج بوش سيحث رئي '; to view on a webpage. If i put the string directly in the html it shows correctly. but when getting it from a variable i just get a string witgh question marks ?????? ??? ????. I also changed some settings in my php.ini but no luck either. does anybody know's how i can make this happen? i noticed that it workes at this server. thanks in advance. below the php.ini settings [code] ; language for internal character representation. mbstring.language = Neutral ; internal/script encoding. ; Some encoding cannot work as internal encoding. ; (e.g. SJIS, BIG5, ISO-2022-*) mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8 ; http input encoding. mbstring.http_input = pass mbstring.http_input = auto mbstring.http_input = UTF-8 mbstring.http_input = UTF-8, SJIS, EUC-JP mbstring.encoding_translation = On ; http output encoding. mb_output_handler must be ; registered as output buffer to function mbstring.http_output = pass mbstring.http_output = UTF-8 ; enable automatic encoding translation accoding to ; mbstring.internal_encoding setting. Input chars are ; converted to internal encoding by setting this to On. ; Note: Do _not_ use automatic encoding translation for ; portable libs/applications. mbstring.encoding_translation = On ; automatic encoding detection order. ; auto means mbstring.detect_order = auto mbstring.detect_order = ASCII, UTF-8, SJIS, EUC-JP, JIS [/code] I noticed after viewing the source of my post a came across these encode arab letters. ل مسؤول أميركي رفي with what function can i do this? Thanks