simple_html_dom ignores special characters - php

Question

The code I am using is the one below, this works perfectly fine until I encounter url with Japanese character or any special characters. I have observed this issue and it seems that it is only returning the domain name whenever the url contains special characters such as japanese, as a result I kept getting random results which I don't intend to retrieve.
include_once 'simple_html_dom.php';
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$url_link = 'http://kissanime.com/Anime/Knights-of-Ramune-VS騎士ラムネ＆40FRESH';
$html = file_get_html($url_link);
echo $html->find('.bigChar', 0)->innertext;
I should be getting a result of "Knights of Ramune" since that's the element I was trying to retrieve. Instead, the $url_link was redirected to domain name which is the 'http://kissanime.com/' without 'Anime/Knights-of-Ramune-VS騎士ラムネ＆40FRESH'. And from there, it looks for the class with a value of '.bigChar' that results of giving random value.

Answer 1

The Real Problem domain is, how to retrieve the data using a URL with UTF-8 Characters, not simple_html_dom.
First of all, we need to encode the characters:
$url_link = 'http://kissanime.com/Anime/Knights-of-Ramune-VS騎士ラムネ＆40FRESH';
$strPosLastPart = strrpos($url_link, '/') + 1;
$lastPart = substr($url_link, $strPosLastPart);
$encodedLastPart = rawurlencode($lastPart);
$url_link = str_replace($lastPart, $encodedLastPart, $url_link);
Normaly this should work. Since i have test it, it worked not. So I am asking why this error happens, and made a Call using CURL.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Description: An
unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web
request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the
error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not
set to an instance of an object.
Now we know, this page is written in ASP.NET. But i was asking me, why it not work. I added a User Agent, and voila:
$ch = curl_init($url_link);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0');
$data = curl_exec($ch);
echo $data;
All together (working):
$url_link = 'http://kissanime.com/Anime/Knights-of-Ramune-VS騎士ラムネ＆40FRESH';
//Encode Characters
$strPosLastPart = strrpos($url_link, '/') + 1;
$lastPart = substr($url_link, $strPosLastPart);
$encodedLastPart = rawurlencode($lastPart);
$url_link = str_replace($lastPart, $encodedLastPart, $url_link);
//Download Data
$ch = curl_init($url_link);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0');
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Load Data into Html (untested, since i am not using this Lib)
$html = str_get_html($data);
Now the difference would be, to read $data into your simple_html_dom.php class, instead of file_get_html.
Cheers