How to deal with inline PHP foreign language characters? - php

I'm having a problem with my php web app. It is in Portuguese, and while all the data into and from the database inputs and outputs fine, and all the inline html outputs fine, the php strings don't.
For example:
If I have a function that outputs the last update of the database entry:
$output .= 'Última atualização: ' . $date . '.';
When php echoes the above all the accented characters will be garbled. If the same are inline in the HTML or from the database they display normally.
Note: I have declared my encoding as utf-8 both in the html header and in the php script.

The actual PHP file (which is just a text file) also has to have the respective encoding.
And it doesn't work to just add the correct header. You have to open the file, check if the encoding is utf8, if not, cut everything, change the encoding to utf8 and paste everything back. It doesn't work, if you just change the encoding and save the file, unless your text editor has such a function of course!

Try to convert the .php file to UTF-8. This can be done in your editor.

Make sure your browser is set to UTF-8 also. I just ran your above statement:
$output = 'Última atualização: ' . now();
echo $output;
and it looks fine.
If it still doesn't solve your problem, add some more code to get a better idea of what's happening.

Related

Character Encoding/decoding becomes a mess

In a webapp I place a <div id="xxx" contentEditable=true > for editing purpose. The encodeURIComponent(xxx.innerHTML) will be send via Ajax POST type to a server, where a PHP script creates a simple txt file from it which in turn can be downloaded from the user to store it locally or print it on screen. It works perfect so far, but … Yes, but, character encoding is a mess. All special characters like the german Ä are interpretated wrong. In this case as ä
I google for some days and I study PHP methods like iconv() and I know how to set up a browsers character encoding and also set a text editor for a correct correspondending decoding. But nothing helps, its still a messs, or becoming even weired.
So my question is : Where in this encoding/decoding roundtrip from the browser to a server and back to the browser I have to do what, to ensure that an Ä will still be an Ä ?
I answer my question, because it turns out to be another problem as stated above. The contenteditable is actually part of a section of html code. On the serverside with PHP I need to filter out the contenteditable text which I do via a DOMDocument like this:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($_POST["data"]);
then I access the elements and their textual content as usual.
Finally I save the text with
file_put_contents($txtFile, $plainText, LOCK_EX);
The saved text then was a mess as written above. Now it turns out that you need to tell the DOMDocument the character set wich loadHTML() has to interpretate. In this case UTF-8.
First I did it as recommended in PHP this way :
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
But that doesn't help (I wonder). Then I found this answer in SO. And the final solution is this :
$doc->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="UTF-8">' . $_POST["data"]);
Though it works it is a trick. Finally the question is left over, how to do it the right way ? If somebedoy has the definite answer, he is very welcome.
You need to make sure that the content is encoded consistently throughout its roundtrip from user input to server-side storage and back to the browser again.
I would recommend using UTF-8. Check that your HTML document (which includes the contenteditable zone) is UTF-8 encoded, and that the XMLHttpRequest/Ajax request does not specify a different encoding when it sends the content to the server.
Check that your server-side application encodes the text file as UTF-8 also. And check that the HTTP response headers declare the file's encoding as UTF-8 when the file is requested and downloaded in the browser.
Somewhere along this path, the encoding differs, and that is what is causing the error. iconv converts between different encodings, which should not be necessary if everything is consistent.
Good luck!

XML file isn't UTF-8 encoded when created in PHP

I'm trying to output XML file using PHP, and everything is right except that the file that is created isn't UTF-8 encoded, it's ANSI. (I see that when I open the file an do the Save as...).
I was using
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
but I figured out that non-english characters don't appear on the output.
I was searching for solution and I tryed first adding
header("Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8");
at the beginning of the php script but it say's:
Extra content at the end of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
I've tryed some other suggestions like not to include 'UTF-8' when creating the document but to write it separately:
$doc->encoding = 'UTF-8'; , but the result was the same.
I used
$doc->save("filename.xml");
to save the file, and I've tryed to change it to
$doc->saveXML();
but the non-english characters didn't appear.
Any ideas?
ANSI is not a real encoding. It's a word that basically means "whatever encoding my Windows computer is configured to use". Getting ANSI is a clear sign of relying on default encoding somewhere.
In order to generate valid UTF-8 output, you have to feed all XML functions with proper UTF-8 input. The most straightforward way to do it is to save your PHP source code as UTF-8 and then just type some non-English letters. If you are reading data from external sources (such as a database) you need to ensure that the complete toolchain makes proper use of encodings.
Whatever, using "Save as" in an undisclosed piece of software is not a reliable way to determine the file encoding.

An error occurred while displaying Korean in PHP

Hi all I need your help for my problem.
I try to display text (Korean) from a .txt file but the output is different.
I have a .txt file contains Korean characters like this
냐는 한국을 사랑
but when i try :
$str= file_get_contents($path."result.txt");
echo $str;
on the browser the result came out like this : �먮뒗 �쒓뎅�� �щ옉
but It's OK when i just echo "냐는 한국을 사랑"
IS there something wrong ?
Thank for your help
Either use header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8") in your php file or a meta tag in your html <meta charset='utf-8'>. And make sure the font you are using supports unicode characters you need.
Apparently the character encoding of the file is different from the character encoding of the HTML document that your code is generating.
You could dynamically convert the text data in PHP, or you could just use a suitable conversion program to convert the text file. You could just open the text file in a text editor and use Save As to save it as UTF-8 encoded (without BOM), assuming that your PHP is generating a UTF-8 encoded document.
I struggled a while fixing this problem until I discovered this which works perfectly for me:
echo call_user_func_array('mb_convert_encoding', array("행동 방식",'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8'));

Handle special symbols using PHP (i.e. ™ instead of â„¢)

I'm trying to read an XML document which contains ™ (™), but for some reason, no matter what I try, it always displays as â„¢.
For example:
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<item><title>test</title></item><item><title>™</title></item>');
foreach ($xml->item AS $item)
{
echo $item->title . "<br />";
}
Results in:
test
â„¢
Just to be clear, I don't want it to just show appropriately, I need to insert it to a DB.
Thanks!
The code in your original post works fine for me, at least if I add <xml> tags. Make sure the content encoding of your HTML page is set correctly, i.e. send the HTTP header Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8 or set this in your <head>. When inserting the string containing this symbol into the database, first set the character set to UTF-8 using SET NAMES UTF8. Of course, the database/table/field into which you are inserting should be set to UTF8 too.
Try using utf8_decode or utf8_encode php functions. They should convert it into the correct character.
echo utf8_decode($this->title);
Run htmlentities() over the whole string before you load it into simplexmlelement. This will convert anything PHP recognises as a html entity (e.g. £, &, €). This will let you store them in your database without havin to use all the mb* functions, and all the other hoops you need to jump through for UTF8 support in databases.
If you have any really special characters that can not be encoded this way, this will not work.
If php is getting it from the XML file correctly, and the problem is outputting it into your database, use htmlspecialchars, which will convert all symbols into their html equivalents. The symbol will be stored as "™", which can be handled well when you retrieve it from the database.

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.

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