Storing Special Characters In An Array

[JustinK101]

Can I store special characters such as Arabic and other language symbols in a standard array defined as:

 

$my_array = array();

 

Do I have to define it as UTF-8?

[effigy]

What are you using this for? If you're using regular expressions you can use the block ranges and/or properties to do this. An arraying example is here.

[JustinK101]

Just storing text strings, but the array is going to be used for locization, so say I want to store spanish characters or other language special characters, such as Arabic and Japanese characters in the array am I going to have problems?

[effigy]

Not if they're all stored with the same encoding or you include some metadata about each character's encoding.

[JustinK101]

That is what I am asking, do I have to define the encoding type for the array, I am using utf8 for all my columns in my database. Thanks!

[DarkWater]

Define the encoding, and read up on PHP unicode functions.

[JustinK101]

How do I define the encoding? Reading the doc you linked to, only seems to exist in php6, I am running php5.

[DarkWater]

Yeah, Unicode support was GREATLY increased in PHP 6.  =/  Do some google searches on "php 5 unicode" and see what you can find.

[JustinK101]

So any idea what happens if you try and put a standard Janpanse character/gylf in a php5 array as a string?

[effigy]

Characters are just representations of numbers and you can store numbers anywhere. It's how these numbers are interpreted that determines the outcome.

 

Therefore, if you're using UTF-8 on your page, store the characters in UTF-8.

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<pre>
<?php
$chars = array(
	pack('C*', 0xe2, 0x80, 0x94), ### Em dash
	pack('C*', 0xe2, 0x84, 0xa2), ### Trade mark
);
print_r($chars);
?>
</pre>