why am i getting � instead of double qoutes? - php

I am trying to call some data from my local database to my extension using PHP. But while calling I don't know why the double quotes is shown as �. so can some help me out with this.
I also tried using
htmlspecialchars()
but it did not help at all.
thank you

Try this
$var = "YOUR TEXT";
$foo = mb_substr($var,0,142, "utf-8");
DESCRIPTION : If you see that character (� U+FFFD "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER") it usually means that the text itself is encoded in some form of single byte encoding but interpreted in one of the unicode encodings (UTF8 or UTF16).
If it were the other way around it would (usually) look something like this: ä.
Probably the original encoding is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1. You can check this without having to change your script: Browsers give you the option to re-interpret a page in a different encoding -- in Firefox use "View" -> "Character Encoding".
IF ABOVE THING IS NOT WORKING TRY THIS:
To make the browser use the correct encoding, add an HTTP header like this:
header("Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1");
or put the encoding in a meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Alternatively you could try to read from the database in another encoding (UTF-8, preferably) or convert the text with iconv().

just try this header if it works means comment it
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-7');

Try this :
" or "
If you use an HTML entity name or a hexadecimal number, the character will always display correctly.
This is independent of what character set (encoding) your page uses!

Related

Remove non-standard characters from html PHP

How can i remove only � (using curl To get data)
$str = "Check this out <a href=�http://www.somewebsite.com�>Somewebsite</a>, this is a great website
Windows� (XP 32bit/Vista/7/8/8.1)";
I just want � to be removed.
I tried
$output = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/","",$str);
it remove html also ... but i want html
Instead of doing a bad work-around like that, you should fix your charset issue instead. Your problem is likely that you don't use the same character-encoding in all levels of your application/scripts. Anything that has or can be set to a specific character-encoding, should be set to the same. The most general ones are below.
Save the document as UTF-8 (or UTF8 w/o BOM) (If you're using Notepad++, it's Format -> Convert to UFT-8 or UTF8 w/o BOM)
The header in both PHP and HTML should be set to UTF-8
HTML: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />, inside the <head>-tag in your document.
PHP: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); - PHP headers has to be set BEFORE any output is made (no HTML, no whitespace, no echo/print - nothing).
There are other aspects as well that might need to be set to UTF-8, it depends on what kind of PHP functions you are using and so on. But the above is generally a good start.

Weird characters though using the right encoding

I work on a website that has different language interfaces, so far I use english and german.
when the german text is loaded, it shows weird characters like the following screenshot
though I use
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
and also in the html header
<META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
what else can I do to solve it ?
Thanks
The content of the page needs to also be in UTF-8. Your content was probably made using MS Word, which uses Windows 1251 encoding. You need to re-save your document as UTF-8.
UTF-8 does not convert formats for you.
If those strings are saved in a file, the file has to be encoded in UTF-8 too.
If you're getting them from a database, they'll have to be stored as UTF-8 and you'll have to set the connection charset to utf-8.
You could also check whether your text is UTF-8 and if not, convert it with utf8_encode.

Unicode and PHP - am I doing something wrong?

I'm using Kohana 3, which has full support for Unicode.
I have this as the first child of my <head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The Unicode character I am inserting into is é as in Café.
However, I am getting the triangle with a ? (as in could not decode character).
As far as I can tell in my own code, I am not doing any string manipulation on the text.
In fact, I have placed the accent straight into a view's PHP file and it is still not working.
I copied the character from this page: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00e9/index.htm
I've only just started examining PHP's Unicode limitations, so I could be doing something horribly wrong.
So, how do I display this character? Do I need to resort to the HTML entity?
Update
So this works
Caf<?php echo html_entity_decode('é', ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?>
Why does that work? If I copy the output accented e from that script and insert it into my document, it doesn't work.
View the http headers. You should see something like
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Browsers don't pay much attention to meta tags, if there was a real http header stating a different encoding.
update
Whatcha get from this?
echo bin2hex('é');
echo chr(0xc3) . chr(0xa9);
You should get c3a9é, otherwise I'd say file encoding issue.
I guess, you see �, the replacement character for invalid UTF-8 byte sequences. Your text is not UTF-8 encoded. Check your editor’s settings to control the encoding of the PHP file.
If you’re not sure about the encoding of your sources, you can enforce UTF-8 compatibilty as described here (German text): Force UTF-8.
You should never need entities except the basic ones.

PHP print() Arabic string

When I try and execute this code to print out an Arabic string: print("إضافة"); I get this output: إضاÙØ©. If I utf8_decode() it I'll get ?????. I have "AddLanguage ar" in my apache configuration but it doesn't help. How do i print out this Arabic string?
Also set your page language to utf8 eg:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
and then see it if worked. If that still doesn't work, go and check this out, it is complete solution for the arabic language using PHP:
http://www.ar-php.org/en_index_php_arabic.html
You may want to check out this too:
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2875.html
It might be necessary to indicate to the browser which charset you are using -- I'm guessing it's UTF-8.
IN order to achive that, you might try putting this portion of code at the beginning of your script, before any output is generated :
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
[utf8_decode][1] will try to decode your string from UTF-8 to latin1, which is not suited for Arabic characters -- hence the '?' characters.
You may want to set
default_charset = "utf-8"
in your php.ini. Default charset directive instructs the server to produce correct content type header.
You can also do it in runtime:
ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8');
You may also want to check your browser font if it has Arabic support. Stick to common fonts like Arial Unicode and Times New Roman.
Well,
First: Add by the beginning of HTML page
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
second:
if you are using AJAX encode data using encodeURIComponent
Third:
First line of your PHP page should be
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
and decode the data sent to PHP using urldecode
Regards,

PHP output showing little black diamonds with a question mark

I'm writing a php program that pulls from a database source. Some of the varchars have quotes that are displaying as black diamonds with a question mark in them (�, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, I assume from Microsoft Word text).
How can I use php to strip these characters out?
If you see that character (� U+FFFD "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER") it usually means that the text itself is encoded in some form of single byte encoding but interpreted in one of the unicode encodings (UTF8 or UTF16).
If it were the other way around it would (usually) look something like this: ä.
Probably the original encoding is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1. You can check this without having to change your script: Browsers give you the option to re-interpret a page in a different encoding -- in Firefox use "View" -> "Character Encoding".
To make the browser use the correct encoding, add an HTTP header like this:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
or put the encoding in a meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Alternatively you could try to read from the database in another encoding (UTF-8, preferably) or convert the text with iconv().
I also faced this � issue. Meanwhile I ran into three cases where it happened:
substr()
I was using substr() on a UTF8 string which cut UTF8 characters, thus the cut chars could not be displayed correctly. Use mb_substr($utfstring, 0, 10, 'utf-8'); instead. Credits
htmlspecialchars()
Another problem was using htmlspecialchars() on a UTF8 string. The fix is to use: htmlspecialchars($utfstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
preg_replace()
Lastly I found out that preg_replace() can lead to problems with UTF. The code $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9ÄäÜüÖöß]/', ' ', $string); for example transformed the UTF string "F(×)=2×-3" into "F � 2� ". The fix is to use mb_ereg_replace() instead.
I hope this additional information will help to get rid of such problems.
This is a charset issue. As such, it can have gone wrong on many different levels, but most likely, the strings in your database are utf-8 encoded, and you are presenting them as iso-8859-1. Or the other way around.
The proper way to fix this problem, is to get your character-sets straight. The simplest strategy, since you're using PHP, is to use iso-8859-1 throughout your application. To do this, you must ensure that:
All PHP source-files are saved as iso-8859-1 (Not to be confused with cp-1252).
Your web-server is configured to serve files with charset=iso-8859-1
Alternatively, you can override the webservers settings from within the PHP-document, using header.
In addition, you may insert a meta-tag in you HTML, that specifies the same thing, but this isn't strictly needed.
You may also specify the accept-charset attribute on your <form> elements.
Database tables are defined with encoding as latin1
The database connection between PHP to and database is set to latin1
If you already have data in your database, you should be aware that they are probably messed up already. If you are not already in production phase, just wipe it all and start over. Otherwise you'll have to do some data cleanup.
A note on meta-tags, since everybody misunderstands what they are:
When a web-server serves a file (A HTML-document), it sends some information, that isn't presented directly in the browser. This is known as HTTP-headers. One such header, is the Content-Type header, which specifies the mimetype of the file (Eg. text/html) as well as the encoding (aka charset).
While most webservers will send a Content-Type header with charset info, it's optional. If it isn't present, the browser will instead interpret any meta-tags with http-equiv="Content-Type". It's important to realise that the meta-tag is only interpreted if the webserver doesn't send the header. In practice this means that it's only used if the page is saved to disk and then opened from there.
This page has a very good explanation of these things.
As mentioned in earlier answers, it is happening because your text has been written to the database in iso-8859-1 encoding, or any other format.
So you just need to convert the data to utf8 before outputting it.
$text = “string from database”;
$text = utf8_encode($text);
echo $text;
To make sure your MYSQL connection is set to UTF-8 (or latin1, depending on what you're using), you can do this to:
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$con);
or use this to check what charset you are using:
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
$charset = mysql_client_encoding($con);
echo "The current character set is: $charset\n";
More info here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php
I chose to strip these characters out of the string by doing this -
ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none");
$text= mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
Just Paste This Code In Starting to The Top of Page.
<?php
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
?>
Based on your description of the problem, the data in your database is almost certainly encoded as Windows-1252, and your page is almost certainly being served as ISO-8859-1. These two character sets are equivalent except that Windows-1252 has 16 extra characters which are not present in ISO-8859-1, including left and right curly quotes.
Assuming my analysis is correct, the simplest solution is to serve your page as Windows-1252. This will work because all characters that are in ISO-8859-1 are also in Windows-1252. In PHP you can change the encoding as follows:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1252');
However, you really should check what character encoding you are using in your HTML files and the contents of your database, and take care to be consistent, or convert properly where this is not possible.
Add this function to your variables
utf8_encode($your variable);
Try This Please
mb_substr($description, 0, 490, "UTF-8");
This will help you. Put this inside <head> tag
<meta charset="iso-8859-1">
That can be caused by unicode or other charset mismatch. Try changing charset in your browser, in of the settings the text will look OK. Then it's question of how to convert your database contents to charset you use for displaying. (Which can actually be just adding utf-8 charset statement to your output.)
what I ended up doing in the end after I fixed my tables was to back it up and change back the settings to utf-8 then I altered my dump file so that DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci are my character set entries
now I don't have characterset issues anymore because the database and browser are utf8.
I figured out what caused it. It was the web page+browser effects on the DB. On the terminals that are linux (ubuntu+firefox) it was encoding the database in latin1 which is what the tabes are set. But on the windows 10+edge terminals, the entries were force coded into utf8. Also I noticed the windows 10 has issues staying with latin1 so I decided to bend with the wind and convert all to utf8.
I figured it was a windows 10 issue because we started using win 10 terminals.
so yet again microsoft bugs causes issues. I still don't know why the encoding changes on the forms because the browser in windows 10 shows the latin1 characterset but when it goes in its utf8 encoded and I get the data anomaly. but in linux+firefox it doesn't do that.
This happened to work in my case:
$text = utf8_decode($text)
I turns the black diamond character into a question mark so you can:
$text = str_replace('?', '', utf8_decode($text));
Just add these lines before headers.
Accurate format of .doc/docx files will be retrieved:
if(ini_get('zlib.output_compression'))
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off');
ob_clean();
When you extract data from anywhere you should use functions with the prefix md_FUNC_NAME.
Had the same problem it helped me out.
Or you can find the code of this symbol and use regexp to delete these symbols.
You can also change the caracter set in your browser. Just for debug reasons.
Using the same charset (as suggested here) in both the database and the HTML has not worked for me... So remembering that the code is generated as HTML, I chose to use the "(HTML code) or the " (ISO Latin-1 code) in my database text where quotes were used. This solved the problem while providing me a quotation mark. It is odd to note that prior to this solution, only some of the quotation marks and apostrophes did not display correctly while others did, however, the special code did work in all instances.
I ran the "detect encoding" code after my collation change in phpmyadmin and now it comes up as Latin_1.
but here is something I came across looking a different data anomaly in my application and how I fixed it:
I just imported a table that has mixed encoding (with diamond question marks in some lines, and all were in the same column.) so here is my fix code. I used utf8_decode process that takes the undefined placeholder and assigns a plain question mark in the place of the "diamond question mark " then I used str_replace to replace the question mark with a space between quotes.
here is the
[code]
include 'dbconnectfile.php';
//// the variable $db comes from my db connect file
/// inx is my auto increment column
/// broke_column is the column I need to fix
$qwy = "select inx,broke_column from Table ";
$res = $db->query($qwy);
while ($data = $res->fetch_row()) {
for ($m=0; $m<$res->field_count; $m++) {
if ($m==0){
$id=0;
$id=$data[$m];
echo $id;
}else if ($m==1){
$fix=0;
$fix=$data[$m];
$fix = utf8_decode($fix);
$fixx =str_replace("?"," ",$fix);
echo $fixx;
////I echoed the data to the screen because I like to see something as I execute it :)
}
}
$insert= "UPDATE Table SET broke_column='".$fixx."' where inx='".$id."'";
$insresult= $db->query($insert);
echo"<br>";
}
?>
For global purposes.
Instead of converting, codifying, decodifying each text I prefer to let them as they are and instead change the server php settings.
So,
Let the diamonds
From the browser, on the view menu select
"text encoding" and find the one which let's you see your text
correctly.
Edit your php.ini and add:
default_charset = "ISO-8859-1"
or instead of ISO-8859 the one which fits your text encoding.
Go to your phpmyadmin and select your database and just increase the length/value of that table's field to 500 or 1000 it will solve your problem.

Categories