Recommended internal encoding for PHP

[NotionCommotion]

I look at my phpinfo() output, and it has ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 all over it.  UTF is not listed once.

 

Furthermore, mb_internal_encoding() displays it as ISO-8859-1.

 

For the most part, I stick to the default settings unless I have a specific reason to change.

 

Should I be changing php.ini to use UTF-8?  If so, any specific advice how to do so?  This whole encoding issue has been causing me major grief today

[requinix]

As long as you use the same thing everywhere, and that isn't the GBK encoding (which is for Chinese so I doubt you would), you'll be fine.

 

Latin1 (ISO 8859-1) vs UTF-8 is a question of what characters you want to support. UTF-8 would be a great choice because it supports much, much more than Latin1 does.

Edited January 12, 2015 by requinix
typo

[Jacques1]

All those encoding settings are irrelevant unless you actually use them. Do you?

 

For example, the internal encoding of the mb extension is only used as a default value for a couple of mb_* functions. If you don't use those, or if you always declare the encoding explicitly, then why care about the default encoding?

[NotionCommotion]

Thanks requinix and jacques,

 

In regards to Chinese, are we talking Mandarin or Cantonese?  I actually could count to ten in Cantonese   Don't know the alphabet, so guess I don't need to go there.

 

In regards to using the mb extensions, yes, I unfortunately recently needed to do so.  I must read a file and look at the first few bytes of each line, and parse the rest of the line as appropriate.  Took me for a loop.