UTF encoding, accents and such

[LLLLLLL]

I saw another thread here about utf8_encode, but that doesn't seem to help me, even though the issues seem about the same.

 

My application has a configuration area where you create products, and the ordering area where customers order them. I'm confused about accent handling, and character sets in general.

 

Some notes:

* When é is added to a field (configuration area) that displays as a textbox, the user saves and then the character displays as nonsense.

* When é is added to a textarea field in the configuration area, the user saves and then the character displays properly.

* In either case, the é character does not appear correctly in HTML in the customer ordering area.

 

Thoughts?

[requinix]

Make sure all your pages are with the same character encoding. UTF-8 is one of the best choices.

 

When you mix-and-match them, a character will be encoded with method A on one page, then decoded with method B on another page. Many times that will leave you with mojibake.

utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() are one solution, but tend to require a fair bit more work than it would be to just fix the pages.

 

Alternatively there's header():

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");

[QuickOldCar]

There is always issues when comes to different characters and encodings/languages, gotta work your way through them all as there is no best solution to this as of yet.

 

As some pointers, save all data to database as utf-8

Adding this line before the insert should ensure it

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

 

You need to find ways of detecting the encoding/language and then convert them as needed.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-detect-encoding.php

 

Then convert it

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

 

Is also another option to convert

http://php.net/manual/en/book.iconv.php

 

On display:

header("Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8");

<meta charset="utf-8">

 

If is any characters that you need different can replace the characters yourself with maybe a custom function.

[LLLLLLL]

QuickOldCar's solution didn't work for me (I had already tried that) but I will look into the idea from requinix.

 

I noticed that when my string was called with htmlentities( $string) it showed the jibberish, but htmlentities( $string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8' ) worked as expected. Clearly I'd rather set the page to be UTF-8 than to call this html entities stuff every time.

 

I hope what you're saying will work. I'll get back to you.

[LLLLLLL]

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

This works for simply displaying text. However, in the few places that my text is an attribute, I still need to call htmlentities( $str ), but I need to use all three parameters as explained above:

htmlentities( $str, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8' )

 

So it looks like my solution is a combination of both. I guess that's the best PHP can do for me right now.