php how to output arabic characters on windows using powershell - php

Question

I have the below PHP script
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$file = "//192.168.10.206/wwwroot/SABIS CORPORATE/PrepList/Documents/41/1516 Level I Arabic Basic Questions and Answers T1 الأسلوب الخبري.pdf";
echo $file;
?>
and the result is always
PS C:\Users\aaoun> php -q c:\Users\aaoun\Desktop\Test-AAA.php
//192.168.10.206/wwwroot/SABIS CORPORATE/PrepList/Documents/41/1516 Level I Arabic Basic Questions and Answers T1 ╪د┘╪ث
╪│┘┘ê╪ذ ╪د┘╪«╪ذ╪▒┘è.pdf PS C:\Users\aaoun>
I tried UT8 encoding
iconv("unicode", "utf-8", $file);
iconv("Latin1_General_CI_AS","utf-8",$file);
iconv("Arabic_CI_AS","utf-8",$file);
base64_encode($file);
utf8_encode($file);
base64_decode($file);
utf8_decode($file);
iconv('WINDOWS-1256', 'UTF-8', $file);
iconv('cp1256', 'UTF-8', $file);
Nothing seems to work, I keep getting wrong text I need to get the text to check if the file exists ...

Answer 1

Ensure that the encoding of the file-system is the same as the encoding of the string that contains the file-name in your PHP code.
Otherwise you're testing for the wrong file to exist.
For example, if your file-system does not support UTF-8 but the file-name is encoded in UTF-8. As you are using Windows, it is worth noting that Windows filesystems (FAT, FAT32, NTFS) are not UTF-8 aware. you can convert your file name to UTF-16 like
$newName = mb_convert_encoding('your file path', 'UTF-16', 'UTF-8');
If that does not work, you can use urlencode. All characters returned from urlencode are valid in filenames (NTFS/HFS/UNIX).
$newName = urlencode($file);
Try this code to know if the file exists:
if (file_exists('your file path')) {
//file exists;
}
else
{
//Does not exist
}