I'm having a weird problem regarding PHP and charset encoding..
I am developing a PHP Page that outputs some latin (ã, á, à, and so on) characters.
When I run the page from my localhost, it works just fine. However, when I upload it to my test-server and access it via a url, then all latin characters become little squares (in IE by the way).
I've changed the character encoding on my browser back and forth to utf8, western european and so on, but none seem to work
Does anybody have an idea?
Either set the default_charset in php.ini to UTF-8, or if you don't have the control over this, add the following line to the top of the PHP file, before you emit any character to the response body:
header('Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8');
See also:
PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet
Have you checked for different default_charset settings in the php.ini files of your localhost and your test server?
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> // Or actual encoding
</head>
Related
I have 2 similar PHP pages, one displays the UK £ symbol correctly, the other displays a black diamond with a ? in it.
In order to diagnose the problem I cut the code down and they are now identical, but still display differently. How can that be???
This is the code
`
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8">
</head>
<body>
<?php
echo '<p>';
echo "£"."123";
?>
</body>
</html>`
While working with the original code it seemed that I could fix one by removing the charset=utf8 but if I removed it from the other it prefixed the £ with a capital A with an accent.
What is happening here?
You have configured another charset in your apache configuration. Maybe your php are proccessed with ISO-8859-1 and you are defining in your HTML UTF-8. That's an inconsistency. Try to define UTF-8 in your apache configuration.
See this post:
How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache?
In httpd.conf add (or change if it's already there):
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
The reason the issue was occurring was that the PHP files were saved with different encoding. The one which behaved okay had encoding UTF-8, while the problematic file had encoding Windows-1252. I use Bluefish and it all looked okay in there, but when I ran the cat command on the file I could see the odd character.
Thanks for your help!
I am new here, so I apologize if I am doing anything wrong.
I have a form which submits user input onto another page. User is expected to type ä, ö, é, etc... I have placed all of the following in the document:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');
<form action="whatever.php" accept-charset="UTF-8">
I even tried:
ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
When the other page loads, I need to check what the user input with something like:
if ( $_POST['field'] == $check ) {
...
}
But if he inputs something like 'München', PHP will compare 'München' with 'München' and will never trigger TRUE even though it should. Since it is specified UTF-8 everywhere, I am guessing that the server is converting to something else (Windows-1252 as I read on another thread) because it does not support or is not configured to UTF-8. I am using Apache on a local server before I load into production; I have not changed (and don't know how to) any of the default settings. I've been working on a Windows 7, editing with Notepad++ enconding my files in ANSI. If I bin2hex('München') I get '4dc3bc6e6368656e'.
If I echo $_POST['field']; it displays 'München' correctly.
I have researched everywhere for an explanation, all I find is that I should include those tags/headings I already have.
Any help is much appreciated.
You are facing many different problems at the same, let's start with the simplest one.
Problem 1) You say that echo $_POST['field']; will display it correctly? What do you mean with "display"? It can be displayed correctly in two cases:
either the field is in UTF-8 and your page has been declared as UTF-8 and the browser is displaying it as UTF-8 or,
the field is in Latin-1 and the browser has decided (through the auto-detection heuristics) that your page is in Latin-1.
So, the fact that echo $_POST['field']; is correct tells you nothing.
Problem 2) You are using
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');
Is this PHP code? If it is, it will be an error because the header must be set before sending out any byte. If you do this you will not set the Content-Type header and PHP should generate a warning.
Problem 3) You are using
<form action="whatever.php" accept-charset="UTF-8">
Some browsers (IE, mostly) ignore accept-charset if they can coerce the data to be sent in ASCII or ISO Latin-1. So the data will be in UTF-8 and declared as ISO Latin-1 or ISO Latin-1 and sent as ISO Latin-1 (but this second case is not your case).
Have a look at https://stackoverflow.com/a/8547004/449288 to see how to solve this problem.
Problem 4) Which strings are you comparing? For example, if you have
$city = "München"
$_POST['city'] == $city
The result of this code will depend on the encoding of the PHP file. If the file is encoded in ISO Latin-1 and the $_POST correctly contains UTF-8 data, the == will compare different bytes and will return false.
Another solution that may be helpful is in Apache, you can place a directive in your configuration file (httpd.conf) or .htacess called AddDefaultCharset. It looks like this:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset
That will override any other default charsets.
I changed "mbstring.detect_order = pass" in my php.ini file and i worked
I've used Unicode characters in my forms and file many times. I had not any problem up to now.
Try to do these steps and check the result:
Remove header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8'); from your HTML form codes.
Use your form just like <form action="whatever.php"> without accept-charset="UTF-8". (It's better to insert the method of sending data in your form tag).
In target page (whatever.php), insert again <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> in a <head> tag.
I always did my project like what I mentioned here and I did not have any problem with Unicode strings.
This is due to the character encoding of the PHP file(s).
The hardcoded München is stored with the character encoding of the source file(s), in this case ANSI and when that value is compared to the UTF-8 encoded value provided in the $_POST variable, the two will, quite naturally, differ.
The solution to your problem is one of:
Serve and process content with the same encoding as that of the source file(s), in this case likely to be windows-1252.
This would, for starters, include changing the content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" to content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" whenever serving HTML data.
Avoid all hardcoded values that could be affected by character encoding issues between UTF-8 and windows-1252, more or less only hardcode values that only includes English letters and numbers.
Any UTF-8 values would have to be read from a source that ensures they are UTF-8 encoded (for instance a database set to use UTF-8 as storage encoding as well as connection encoding).
Wrap all hardcoded assignments in utf8_encode(), for instance $value = utf8_encode ('München');
Change the encoding of the source file(s) to UTF-8.
This can be accomplished in any number of ways, a decent text editor will be able to do it or the outstanding libiconv can be used, especially for batch processing.
Either solution 1 or 4 would be my preferred solution, especially if multiple people are involved in the project.
As a side-note, some text editors (notably Notepad++) has the option of using either UTF-8 or UTF-8 without BOM. The BOM (Byte Order Mark) is pointless in UTF-8 and will cause problems when writing headers in PHP (most often when doing a redirect). This is because the BOM is right in front of the initial <?php, causing the server to send the BOM just as it would had there been any other character in front. The difference is you'd note a character in front, but the BOM isn't displayed.
Rule of thumb: Always use UTF-8 without BOM.
in PhpMyAdmin it shows up as 'Petite-Réserve" but when i echo it to a webpage it shows as "Petite-R�serve" MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci is the database encoding and <!DOCTYPE html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> is at the top of the page. Not sure how to fix this. I'm allowing users to input text and users are French and English. I'm using Google Chrome and it shows up as a question mark in a triangle. Any ideas?
You need to use the right content-type on the page - since you are outputting latin1 (as defined in your database), try this:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
iso-8859-1 is the encoding name for latin1.
If you use a different encoding to output data to that is has been saved in, you have to encode or decode the data beforehand. Try
utf8_encode($value);
in this case.
Alternatively, change the encoding of your HTML to iso-8859-1.
Often best to decide on one charset and not to mix them. If you mix them you will have to convert between them. mbstring can help there. Best to switch your database to UTF-8. It is more flexible then the latin variations.
Check the HTTP response headers sent by your webserver. One of the headers might include the content-type, and that value in your http headers might not match the UTF-8 encoding declaration you've got in HTML.
I have a PHP file which has the following text:
<div class="small_italic">This is what you´ll use</div>
On one server, it appears as:
This is what you´ll use
And on another, as:
This is what you�ll use
Why would there be a difference and what can I do to make it appear properly (as an apostrophe)?
Note to all (for future reference)
I implemented Gordon's / Gumbo's suggestion, except I implemented it on a server level rather than the application level. Note that (a) I had to restart the Apache server and more importantly, (b) I had to replace the existing "bad data" with the corrected data in the right encoding.
/etc/php.ini
default_charset = "iso-8859-1"
You have to make sure the content is served with the proper character set:
Either send the content with a header that includes
<?php header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=[your charset]"); ?>
or - if the HTTP charset headers don't exist - insert a <META> element into the <head>:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=[your charset]" />
Like the attribute name suggests, http-equiv is the equivalent of an HTTP response header and user agents should use them in case the corresponding HTTP headers are not set.
Like Hannes already suggested in the comments to the question, you can look at the headers returned by your webserver to see which encoding it serves. There is likely a discrepancy between the two servers. So change the [your charset] part above to that of the "working" server.
For a more elaborate explanation about the why, see Gumbo's answer.
The display of the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER � (U+FFFD) most likely means that you’re specifying your output to be Unicode but your data isn’t.
In this case, if the ACUTE ACCENT ´ is for example encoded using ISO 8859-1, it’s encoded with the byte sequence 0xB4 as that’s the code point of that character in ISO 8859-1. But that byte sequence is illegal in a Unicode encoding like UTF-8. In that case the replacement character U+FFFD is shown.
So to fix this, make sure that you’re specifying the character encoding properly according to your actual one (or vice versa).
To sum it maybe up a little bit:
Make sure the FILE saved on the web server has the right encoding
Make sure the web server also delivers it with the right encoding
Make sure the HTML meta tags is set to the right encoding
Make sure to use "standard" special chars, i.e. use the ' instead of ´of you want to write something like "Luke Skywalker's code"
For encoding, UTF-8 might be good for you.
If this answer helps, please mark as correct or vote for it. THX
The simple solution is to use ASCII code for special characters.
The value of the apostrophe character in ASCII is ’. Try putting this value in your HTML, and it should work properly for you.
Set your browser's character set to a defined value:
For example,
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
This is probably being caused by the data you're inserting into the page with PHP being in a different character encoding from the page itself (the most common iteration is one being Latin 1 and the other UTF-8).
Check the encoding being used for the page, and for your database. Chances are there will be a mismatch.
Create an .htaccess file in the root directory:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
AddCharset utf-8 *
<IfModule mod_charset.c>
CharsetSourceEnc utf-8
CharsetDefault utf-8
</IfModule>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
I keep getting these weird text characters when I display user submitted text. like in the following example below. Is there a way I can fox this using PHP, CSS or something so that the characters are displayed properly?
Here is the problem text.
Problems of �real fonts� on the web. The one line summary:
different browsers and different platforms do �hinting�
Here is my meta tag.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
It's an encoding problem. Make sure you send the correct encoding to the browser. If it's UTF-8, you'll do it like this:
header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
Also, make sure that you store the content using the same encoding throughout the entire system. Set your database tables to utf8. If you're using MySQL, run the SET NAMES utf8 query when connecting to make sure you're running in UTF-8.
These weird characters occur when you suddenly switch encoding.
Also, some functions in PHP take a $charset parameter (e.g. htmlentities()). Make sure you pass the correct charset to that one as well.
To make sure that PHP handles your charset correctly in all cases, you can set the default_charset to utf-8 (either in php.ini or using ini_set()).
Set your page to UTF-8 encoding.
Please check with the char-set in header section.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
use this below one:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
or try this one:
htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES);
Could be problem with file encoding please check that your files is correctly encoded, saved as "UTF-8 without boom", also if you are saving to database use SET NAMES UTF-8