Header special char conversion? - php

I have some problems with char conversion on my php's page header.
I have to develop a snippet of code that, means WS (xml-rpc protocol), can interface with another snippet of code wrote in python.
This is python snippet's output:
Output={'metaTagKeyWords': '', 'metaTagTitle': '10% DISCOUNT FOR 3 NIGHTS','metaTagDescription': 'Questa \xc3\xa8 una prova: devo vedere che succede.\r\n\r\nProva prova.\r\n\r\nDaje.\r\n\r\nENGLISH VERSION !!!!\r\n'}
So I have to convert some char: first of all \xc3\xa8 that is the unicode conversion of "è" and, in a second time, the "\r\n\" chars.
I know how to procede with "\r\n\" chars, but I don't know how to convert the unicode char.
I have had alredy tried to do something like this:
htmlentities($data[$META_TITLE_KEY], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')
But it dind't work.
Moreover, I had alredy tried to convert in pyhon the string in UTF-8 (so that entity would be u'\xc3' or something like that, but the results are pretty the same.)
An additional info: that conversion have to be used on php file header, into "meta tag description" tag.
EDIT1:
It's seems to be that, what we belive as an UTF-8, is instead a LATIN-1. So, if i change in the header that part:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
in
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" />
it works.
But I have to have a utf-8 charset; so I suppose that have to do something in python applicative logic (because when I go from editor to DB i encode something while when I return from DB to editor I decode something).
Stay tune for more info
EDIT2:
Maybe some function that i use to save my data onto Postrges DMB, convert data in latin-1 and then in utf-8. So, if I add this instruction:
d_meta[element] = codeDbToEditor(d_meta[element]).replace('\r\n', ' ').decode('latin-1')
everything seems to works.
Have I had the right "insipration"?

$str="Hello Loréane";
echo utf8_encode($str);
Hope It Helps

Related

Character encoding fail, why does \xBD display improperly in PHP + HTML

I'm just trying to understand character encoding a bit better, so I'm doing a few tests.
I have a PHP file that is saved as UTF-8 and looks like this:
<?php
declare(encoding='UTF-8');
header( 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
?><!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo "\xBD"; # Does not work ?>
<?php echo htmlentities( "\xBD" ) ; # Works ?>
</body>
</html>
The page itself shows this:
The gist of the problem is that my web application has a bunch of character encoding problems, where people are copying and pasting from Outlook or Word and the characters get transformed into the diamond question marks (Do those have a real name?)
I'm trying to learn how to make sure all my input is transformed into UTF-8 when the page loads (Basically $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST), and all output is done using proper UTF-8 handling methods.
My question is: Why is my page showing the question mark for the first echo, and does anyone have any other information about making a UTF-8 safe web app in PHP?
0xBD is not valid UTF-8. If you want to encode "½" in UTF-8 then you need to use 0xC2 0xBD instead.
>>> print '\xc2\xbd'.decode('utf-8')
½
If you want to use text from another charset (Latin-1 in this case) then you need to transcode it to UTF-8 first using the various iconv or mb functions.
Also:
$ charinfo �
U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
\xBD is not valid as utf8 what you want is \xC2\xBD, the question mark thing is what applications replace invalid code points with, so if you see that in your utf8 text its either not utf8 or corrupted.

Weird characters appear after I use php's mb_substr() on a string

I'm developing a web site with PHP (5.3.5, Ubuntu) and all the content is in Spanish. I would like to cut the text when it doesn't fit the space designated for it. I have the following meta tag in the php file where I want to do this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />.
The text comes from a MySQL database where charset is latin1 and collation latin1_spanish_ci. I'm trying to cut the text with the mb_substr() function. But it isn't working correctly. For example, let's say I want to cut Short Psicodélico to Short Psicodéli, the function would be:
mb_substr('Short Psicodélico', 0, 15, 'ISO-8859-1');
But the result is something like this: Short Psicod&ea. The e with the diacritic is transformed in &ea and I don't know why. I think it has something to do with the character encoding but I don't know exactly how. If I don't use this function the characters appear as they should, instead of Short Psicod&ea it shows Short Psicodélico.
The text is encoded in the database as "Short Psicodélico". You will need to scrub your database to remove the encoding, as well as fix your input routines to make certain that text is not saved to the database encoded.

Character encoding in PHP

I never had this problem before, it was usually my database or the html page. But now i think its my php. I import text from a csv or from a text area and in both ways it goes wrong.
for example é changes to é. I used htmlentities to fix this but it didn't work. The htmlentities function didn't return é in html but é in html entities, so it already loses the real characters before htmlentities comes in to place... So does that mean my php file has the wrong encoding or something?
I hope someone can help me out..
Thanks!
Chris
A file is usually ISO-8859-1 (Latin) or UTF-8 ... ISO-8859-1 is 1 byte per char, UTF-8 is 1-4 bytes per char. So if you get 2 chars when you expect one, then you are reading UTF-8 and showing it as ISO-8859-1 ... if you get strange chars, then you are reading ISO-8859-1 and showing it as UTF-8.
If you provide more details, it would be easier to pinpoint, but in short, you have inconsistent charsets and need to convert one or the other so they're all the same. But from what it seems, you're using ISO-8859-1 in your project, but you are reading some UTF-8 from somewhere... use utf8_decode($text) if that data should be indeed be stored as UTF-8, or find the data and convert it manually.
EDIT: If you are using AJAX somewhere, then you will ALWAYS get UTF-8 from it, and you'll have to decode it yourself with utf8_decode() if you want to keep using ISO-8859-1.
Try opening your php file and change the encoding to UTF-8
if that doesn't help, add this to your php:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
Or this to your html:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Take a look at PHP's iconv().

PHP SimpleXML Values returned have weird characters in place of hyphens and apostrophes

I have looked around and can't seem to find a solution so here it is.
I have the following code:
$file = "adhddrugs.xml";
$xmlstr = simplexml_load_file($file);
echo $xmlstr->report_description;
This is the simple version, but even trying this any hyphens r apostrophes are turned into: ^a (euro sign) trademark sign.
Things I have tried are:
echo = (string)$xmlstr->report_description; /* did not work */
echo = addslashes($xmlstr->report_description); /* yes I know this doesnt work with hyphens, was mainly trying to see if I could escape the apostrophes */
echo = addslashes((string)$xmlstr->report_description); /* did not work */
also htmlspecial(again i know does not work with hyphens), htmlentities, and a few other tricks.
Now the situation is I am getting the XML files from a feed so I cannot change them, but they are pretty standard. The text with the hyphens etc are encapsulated in a cdata tag and encoding is UTF-8. If I check the source I am shown the hyphens and apostrophes in the source.
Now just to see if the encoding was off or mislabeled or something else weird, I tried to view the raw XML file and sure enough it is displayed correctly.
I am sure that in my rush to find the answer I have overlooked something simple and the fact that this is really the first time I have ever used SimpleXML I am missing a very simple solution. Just don't dock me for it I really did try and find the answer on my own.
Thanks again.
This is the simple version, but even
trying this any hyphens apostrophes
are turned into: ^a (euro sign)
trademark sign.
This is caused by incorrect charset guessing (and possibly recoding).
If a text contains a "curly apostrophe" = "Right single quotation mark" = U+2019 character, saving it in UTF-8 encoding results in bytes 0xE2 0x80 0x99. If the same file is then read again assuming its charset is windows-1252, the byte stream of the apostrophe character (0xE2 0x80 0x99) is interpreted as characters ’ (=small "a" with circumflex, euro sign, trademark sign). Again if this incorrectly interpreted text is saved as UTF-8 the original character results in byte stream 0xC3 0xA2 0xE2 0x82 0xAC 0xE2 0x84 0xA2
Summary: Your original data is UTF-8 and some part of your code that reads the data assumes it is windows-1252 (or ISO-8859-1, which is usually actually treated as windows-1252). A probable reason for this charset assumption is that default charset for HTTP is ISO-8859-1. 'When no explicit charset parameter is provided by the sender, media subtypes of the "text" type are defined to have a default charset value of "ISO-8859-1" when received via HTTP.' Source: RFC 2616, Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
PS. this is a very common problem. Just do a Google or Bing search with query doesn’t -doesn't and you'll see many pages with this same encoding error.
Do you know the document's character set?
You could do header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); before any content is printed, if you havent already.
Make sure you have set up SimpleXML to use UTF-8 too.
Be sure that all the entities are encoded using hex notation, not HTML entities.
Also maybe:
$string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, "utf-8");
will help.
This is a symptom of declaring an incorrect character set in the <head> section of your page (or not declaring and using default character set without accents and special characters).
This does the trick for latin languages.
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
For TOTAL NEWBIES, html pages for browsers have a basic layout, with a HEAD or HEADER which serves to tell the browser some basic stuff about the page, as well as preload some scripts that the page will use to achieve its functionality(ies).
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
Hello world
</body>
</html>
if the <head> section is omitted, html will use defaults (take some things for granted - like using the northamerican character set, which does NOT include many accented letters, whch show up as "weird characters".

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.

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