problem with charset

[jimath]

hi everyone!

 

i have a problem with charset. i am using php 4.3.4.

in all my scripts i ve declared the line

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

 

i put UTF-8 from character encoding in mozzila browser and when i click a link

in my project the letters are changed to sth unintelligible.

 

could anyone help me?

 

 

[haku]

What is unintelligible - text pulled from a database, or text hardcoded into your php documents?

[jimath]

no, the problem is that the character encoding in mozilla changes when i click a link in my page.

[haku]

On the page you are looking at, or the page you go to?

 

It sounds like the output encoding of PHP may not be set to utf-8, in which case the encoding of your browser will change automatically.

[jimath]

in the page i looking at. i change the encoding in mozzilla to utf-8-so greek letters are displayed- and when i click a link

these letters are not readable. english are displayed ok.

[haku]

So you are on page1.php. You click a link on page1.php, and all greek characters on page1.php become unreadable?

[jimath]

exactly.

[haku]

Sorry to get so particular here, but I want to keep confirming. You are saying the text becomes unreadable in between the time you click the link, and the time that the page you are linking to loads?

[jimath]

yes. but at the beginning too(when i load the index.php page are the letters unreadable) . i change the

encoding to utf in mozilla, letters are displayed ok, and when i click a link again unreadable.

[haku]

The problem is that the HTTP headers that are being sent to the browser are not UTF-8, but the encoding of the text inside the files is UTF-8. This was kind of what I thought. There are a few possible reasons for this, but I suspect that your php encoding is set to something other than UTF-8.

 

First, when you switch the encoding in the 'view' menu in firefox, you switch it to UTF-8 and it becomes visible right?

 

Second, create a new php file, and add this one line of code to it:

 

<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

 

Then upload that to the folder that you are having troubles with, and open that file through your browser. Then tell me what it says under

 

HTTP Headers Information  =>  Accept-Charset

 

 

[jimath]

i do not see anything relevant to this (HTTP Headers Information  =>  Accept-Charset)

 

some relevant displayed are:

HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE  el 

HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING  gzip, deflate 

_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING"] gzip, deflate

_ENV["HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING"] gzip, deflate

[haku]

Can you get access to your php.ini file? You may need to contact your hosting company to find out how to do it. It looks like they may not have the encoding set correctly in it.

[jimath]

yes i can.

i opened php.ini and i saw the following:

is anything relevant?

 

 

; http input encoding.

;mbstring.http_input = auto

 

; 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 = Off

 

; automatic encoding detection order.

; auto means

;mbstring.detect_order = auto

 

; substitute_character used when character cannot be converted

; one from another

;mbstring.substitute_character = none;

[haku]

Not if you are using UTF-8. Those are the the multi-byte string library functions, but UTF-8 is a single-byte language.

 

Look for the part of the php.ini that says

 

default_charset = _____________

 

it should read:

 

default_charset = "UTF-8"

 

If it doesn't, then post what it does say.

[jimath]

OK NOW IT WORKS!!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH HAKU!!!

 

IT was

;default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

and i changed it to:

default_charset = "UTF-8"

 

so i have to change the default_charset in php ini

correspondingly to what charset i am using to my scripts?

or using UTF-8 i am covered?

 

[haku]

If utf-8 is what you want to use (it may or may not be, I don't know what the needs or your website are, or what is recommended for working with Greek languages), then everytime something doesn't come out right, look around for something somewhere that isn't in utf-8.

 

So your documents should be encrypted in utf-8, and you should use utf-8 for the internal encoding. You should set emails with ISO-8859-01 (at least for English) though, and I've heard that utf-8 can be unreliable with emails. I dont know though - I program sites in Japanese so I don't use utf-8, I use multibyte character sets which is a whole different game.