I can't get my head around the strtotime() function. I'm working with PHP 7.2.4 and want to parse some date and time strings. Following screenshot was taken in debug mode in PHPStorm:
As seen in the screenshot the grey date values show the same format. But exactly the one I programmatically parse is "suddenly" not valid. I've trimmed the string and everything is in UTF8.
Did I miss something?
The answer came instantly as wrote the question...
Answering my own question
Well, it just came to mind why it is not working: Microsoft uses UTF-8 with BOM by default if something is encoded in UTF8
I've created a file programmatically with C# and encoded it with System.Text.Encoding.UTF8. This encodes with BOM by default. So, for every beginner working with Microsoft Windows, be aware of the encoding of your files you parse later.
My problem was solved then by this solution:
Create Text File Without BOM
Hope this helps someone else.
Related
I have a question on encoding. I have a TinyMCE editor and when you put in the source code part & check;" into it is converts it to a check symbol when it saves into a utf8_general_ci database. When I pull it out into PHP code how can I convert that checkmark back into code that the browser will understand on a utf-8 page? I messed around with htmlspecialchars_decode htmlentities html_entity_decode but couldn't get any of those to work with the checkmark maybe I am using them the wrong way. Thanks for the help.
TinyMCE: 4.5.3 (using defaults)
One Solution
I found out my code files were not encoded as UTF-8 which didn't allow me to copy/paste the actual check symbol to find/replace it. I changed the php file to UTF8 and I was able to str_replace the checks with the html entity version. I feel like there's a better way but this works for now.
This issue is mind-boggling to me. I am facing the following situation. I wrote a website in html using the utf8 charset. Special characters are displayed as expected. Now I want to give out some php mysql results, so the easiest way is to create a php file, include the html code and then give out the results. However the html given out via the php file does not display the special characters correctly... it's not utf8
here is the html version: HTML
and here the exact copy in a php file: HTML VIA PHP
To close this question myself (because I feel rather stupid right now), the one who actually solved this is Marc B as his comments made me understand the process of text encoding.
After setting the header (Content Type and charset) as well as setting the meta tag in HTML I discovered, just like Marc suspected that my IDE had encoded the php file in another encoding than UTF8. Saving the file as UTF8 and replacing the messed up specialchars fixed my issue.
Please excuse this, I wasn't fully aware of what I was doing.
I'd really appreciate some help with this. I've wasted days on this problem and none of the suggestions I have found online seem to give me a fix.
I have a CSV file from a supplier. It appears to have been exported from an Microsoft system.
I'm using PHP to import the data into MySQL (both latest versions).
I have one particular record which contains a strange character that I can't get rid of. Manual editing to remove the character is possible, but I would prefer an automated solution as this will happen multiple times a day.
The character appears to be an interpretation of a “smart quote”. A hex editor tells me that the character codes are C2 and 92. In the hex editor it looks like a weird A followed by a smart quote. In other editors and Calc, Writer etc it just appears as a box. ﾒ
I'm using mb_detect_encoding to determine the encoding. All records in the CSV file are returned as ASCII, except the one with the strange character, which is returned as UTF-8.
I can insert the offending record into MySQL and it just appears in Workbench as a square.
MySQL tables are configured to utf-8 – utf8_unicode_ci and other unusual UTF characters (eg fractions) are ok.
I've tried lots of solutions to this...
How to detect malformed utf-8 string in PHP?
Remove non-utf8 characters from string
Removing invalid/incomplete multibyte characters
How to detect malformed utf-8 string in PHP?
How to replace Microsoft-encoded quotes in PHP
etc etc but none of them have worked for me.
All I really want to do is remove or replace the offending character, ideally with a search and replace for the hex values but none of the examples I have tried have worked.
Can anyone help me move forward with this one please?
EDIT:
Can't post answer as not enough reputation:
Thanks for your input. Much appreciated.
I'm just going to go with the hex search and replace:
$DodgyText = preg_replace("/\xEF\xBE\x92/", "" ,$DodgyText);
I know it's not the elegant solution, but I need a quick fix and this works for me.
Another solution is:
$contents = iconv('UTF-8', 'Windows-1251//IGNORE',$contents);
$contents = iconv('Windows-1251', 'UTF-8//IGNORE',$contents);
Where you can replace Windows-1251 to your local encoding.
At a quick glance, this looks like a UTF-8 file. (UTF-8 is identical with the first 128 characters in the ASCII table, hence everything is detected as ASCII except for the special character.)
It should work if your database connection is also UTF-8 encoded (which it may not be by default).
How to do that depends on your database library, let us know which one you're using if you need help setting the connection encoding.
updated code based on established findings
You can do search & replace on strings using hexadecimal notation:
str_replace("\xEF\xBE\x92", '', $value);
This would return the value with the special code removed
That said, if your database table is UTF-8, you shouldn't need that conversion; instead you could look at the connection (or session) character set (i.e. SET NAMES utf8;). Configuring this depends on what library you use to connect to your database.
To debug the value you could use bin2hex(); this usually helps in doing searches online.
I'm having a problem parsing data from different feeds, some of them in English, others in Italian and others in Spanish. I'm parsing using a PHP script and saving the parsed data into my MySQL database.
The problem is that when I parse items that contains "non common" characters like: "Strage di Viareggio Più" when I look into my database the phrase is stored in this way: "Strage di Viareggio Più".
My database can use that kind character because when I input that manualy it works fine, in the original feed (rss file) the phrase is also fine, I think is my PHP server who is changing the letter. How can I solve this? Thanks!
Make sure that the database uses UTF-8 (as you say it does) and that the PHP script has its internal encoding set to UTF-8, which you can achieve with iconv_set_encoding. If you're reading data from an HTTP request that should be all you need, as long as the request tags its own encoding correctly.
Looks like input data is in UTF-8, but charset/collation of DB table - ASCII. I would suggest to have UTF-8 everywhere.
What you need to implement, before saving to MySQL is:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
Check these different threads for more information
Best practices in PHP and MySQL with international strings
htmlentities() makes Chinese characters unusable
What I find incredible is that this question has received -2 in the past 24 hours without any comments.
From the question posted:
I'm parsing using a PHP script and saving the parsed data into my MySQL database.
and
I think is my PHP server who is changing the letter. How can I solve this? Thanks!
The answers posted so far are related to the encoding and settings of MySQL. The person asking the question has clearly stated that he can insert special characters manually and is having no problems:
My database can use that kind character because when I input that manualy it works fine
My answer was to help him convert the characters into an html entity which will circumvent the problem he is having with the RSS feed and answering the question posted.
I'm doing a kind of roundabout experiment thing where I'm pulling data from tables in a remote page to turn it into an ICS so that I can find out when this sports team is playing (because I can't find anywhere that the information is more readily available than in this table), but that's just to give you some context.
I pull this data using cURL and parse it using domDocument. Then I take it and parse it for the info I need. What's giving me trouble is the opposing team. When I display the data on the initial PHP page, it's correct. But when I write to an ICS file, special UTF-8 characters get messed up. I thought utf8_encode would solve that problem, but it actually seems to have the opposite effect: when I run the function on my data, even the stuff displayed on the page (which had been displaying correctly), not in the separate ICS file (which was writing incorrectly), is incorrect. As an example: it turns "Inđija" to "InÄija."
Any tips or resources as far as dealing with UTF-8 strings in PHP? My server (a remote host) doesn't have mbstring installed either, which is a pain.
utf8_encode encodes a string in ISO 8859-1 as UTF-8. If you put UTF-8 into it, it's going to interpret it as if it was ISO 8859-1, and hence produce mojibake.
To help with your first problem, before this, I'd want to know what sort of "special" characters are being messed up in the original problem, and what way are they being messed up?