Russian Characters in URL PHP - php

Question

I have scoured the internet and I'm either not finding the answer or I'm unable to implement it correctly.
Basically I am trying to implement a website in Russian on PHP. I have already got the website in English and French but bringing a whole new range of characters in has sort of broken the test site. My actual goal is to have the Cyrillic characters in the URL, similar to how Wikipedia are able to do it > https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Компьютер and also still find this in the database to show the correct location information.
In my SQL database I have a range of locations, countries such as France, Germany, Australia etc. I have set it up so that the location page is generated dynamically from those entries using the $data['Name'] variable. Now... in the header.php file I use this to generate the location names from the database for the navigation:
<li class="dropdown">
Места
<ul>
<?php if (is_array($locations)) {
foreach ($locations as $key => $location) {
$name = strtolower(str_ireplace(" ","-", $location['name']));
if ($location['top_location'] == 1)
echo '<li>'.$location['name'].'</li>';
}
}
?>
</ul>
</li>
Where $name is replaced by database entries. If I change one of the database entries to Russian (Australia for example - Австралия) then the location page throws a 404 error as it's actually trying to find location/%D0%90%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%8F rather than location/Австралия.
My location page has the following code to get information from the database:
<?php
include './inc/utils.php';
if (isset($_GET['id'])) {
$name = str_ireplace("-"," ", $_GET['id']);
$result = get_data("Locations", array("name" => $name))[0];
}
else
$result = null;
if ($result != null) {
$data['Name'] = $result['name'];
$data['Url_Name'] = $_GET['id'];
$data['Image'] = $result['image'];
$data['Slider_Text'] = $result['slider_text'];
$data['Description'] = $result['description'];
$data['Country'] = $result['top_location'] != 0 ? true : false;
$data['Cars_In_Location'] = get_cars_in_location($result['id']);
$img_url = $MASTER['car_img_url'];
$link_url = $MASTER['base_url'].'car/';
$cities_id = explode(",", $result['related']);
foreach ($cities_id as $value) {
$data['Related'][] = get_data("Locations", array("id" => $value))[0];
}
}
else {
$data['Name'] = "";
$data['Url_Name'] = "";
$data['Image'] = "";
$data['Slider_Text'] = "";
$data['Description'] = "";
$data['Country'] = false;
$data['Related'] = "";
$data['Cars_In_Location'] = "";
}
if (empty($data['Name']) == true) {
header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
header('Location: '.$MASTER['base_url'].'404.php');
}
include 'header.php';
?>
I have tried using urldecode to no avail. I think I am missing something either on the SQL side or in one of the function files.
my header.php file contains both
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> and
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
as well as my location page containing
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
my .htaccess file has
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
I don't know what else I'm missing.
You can see the page here:
https://redfoxluxurycarhire.com/ru/location/Австралия
I am using print_r($host_url) to correctly print the URL despite what it shows so you can see my issue. I am also able to echo Австралия onto the location pages with no problems or encoding.
Any help would be much appreciated as I'm wracking my brain as how to get this to work!

Answer 1

I would start checking if you have any file-systems encoding problem. Check your scripts are using UTF-8, I believe your MySQL database is OK. You should be able to decode requests with urldecode.