Special characters in PHP scripts stops execution - php

Question

I am importing employee data from .csv file as bulk operation. There is many fields like First name, Last Name, Email, Contact No, Address etc.
Email field in database is Index/Unique. So i have put validation over it.
But my question is when certain rows contains special characters like matinées#fauts.net or débutante#peured.info [focus é].
This will stops php script execution unexpectedly without error log. I have also go through Apache Error Log/PHP Error Log but there is no errors. Please help me to prevent this.
I have also tried to set character encoding scheme to UTF-8 or Westorn-ISO-800 etc, but this will not work.
Code snippet:
` $firstname = $sd[0];
if ($firstname != '' || !empty($firstname)) {
$lastname = $sd[1];
$email = $sd[2];
if ($sd[3] != '' && $sd[3] != NULL) {
$password = md5( $sd[3]);
}
$contactno = $sd[4];
$internalextension = $sd[5];
$companyid = $this->session->userdata('companyid');
if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
return array("status" => FALSE, "message" => "Error while Importing Employee. Please Check Your .csv "
. "file; <br/> Your file contains Invalid Email Id at Line number" . ($count + 1) . ". Email: $email");
} else {
if ($count != 500) {
$query = $query . "(NULL, '" . $firstname . "', '" . $lastname . "', '" . $email . "', "
. "'" . $password . "', '" . $salt . "', 1, '" . $contactno . "',"
. "'" . $internalextension . "', 4, " . $companyid . ", '" . my_datenow() . "'),";
} else {
$query = $query . "(NULL, '" . $firstname . "', '" . $lastname . "', '" . $email . "', "
. "'" . $password . "', '" . $salt . "', 1, '" . $contactno . "',"
. "'" . $internalextension . "', 4, " . $companyid . ", '" . my_datenow() . "');";
echo $query;
}
}
} else {
return array("status" => FALSE, "message" => "Error while Importing Employee. Please Check Your .csv file; First Name should not be blank.");
}`

Answer 1

You can use htmlspecialchars() before assigning value to variable for example
$firstname = htmlspecialchars($sd[0]);
htmlspecialchars — Convert special characters to HTML entities
reference : http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php