I have a website that will allow people to post things to it using the subject line of an email in Outlook. Using PHP and imap, I get the subject line of the text and store it in a mysql db. But every once in a while, someone will copy text from a website into the subject line of that email and I will get garbled text. Similar to this:
=?Windows-1252?Q?_Every_day_in_our_offices_we_recycle_cardboard,aluminum?=
=?Windows-1252?Q?=96_won=92t_you_join_us=3F?=
What I've done is try to decode this text so it will appear normal on the page using the following code:
$subject = strip_tags($mailHeader->subject);
$header = imap_mime_header_decode($subject);
$subject = "";
for($i=0;$i<count($header);$i++)
{
$subject .= $header[$i]->text;
}
When finished I get rid of most of the garbled text, but am left behind with replacement characters for an em dash and a curly quote that was in the original subject line text. See the result below:
Every day in our offices we recycle cardboard, aluminum, � won�t you join us?
The charset for the website is set to UTF-8. When I set the website charset to ISO-8859-1, the replacement characters are replaced with the curly quote and em dash, which is great but I want to leave the website's charset at UTF-8.
Any help on how to get rid of the replacement characters without changing the charset to ISO-8859-1 would be great. Thanks.
Code above works except for one small change to the very end:
$subject .= mb_convert_encoding($header[$i]->text, "UTF-8", $header[$i]->charset);
Each of the objects returned by imap_mime_header_decode includes a charset property, which you are ignoring. You would need to convert each one to UTF-8 in your loop, using something like:
$subject .= mb_convert_encoding($header[$i]->text, "UTF-8", $header[$i]->charset);
As an alternative, consider using the mb_decode_mimeheader or iconv_mime_decode_headers functions. Both of these functions do the entire job of decoding a MIME header for you, returning a string in PHP's internal encoding (which is usually UTF-8).
I'm having an issue that i believe is related to unicode text. When the user enters a string that has the unicode bullet character, mysql is not able to save that field (the rest of the update query works though). Here's how i've been trying to deal with it.
$str = "· Close up the server";
$str = preg_replace("\u2022", "•", $str);
...however this is still not working.
So many things can go wrong here, because database, form submits and source code string literals are all involved. I'll assume you want to use UTF-8, because with any other typical encoding (CP1252, Latin1) you'll be screwed when you want to use json_ or accept more than ~200 different characters.
The first thing to do is remove any kind of conversion etc code that was written with the intention of trying to fix encoding issues. Such as utf8_encode, htmlentitites, *_replace.. whatever.
Source encoding.
$str = "· Close up the server";
When writing the above, the PHP source file needs to be physically encoded in UTF-8. If you are on Windows, you must explicitly do or configure this. UTF-8 doesn't happen magically on Windows.
Form submits
When user submits a form, the payload will be in whatever encoding you declared the page to be. You can declare it like so:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
But anyone can actually submit arbitrary bytes to your server, so you should validate the input is in UTF-8 before proceeding. mb_check_encoding is good.
Database
Since at this point your data is coming in as UTF-8, your input strings are in UTF-8. You must specify this after connecting to the database, by specifying a connection encoding.
mysql_set_charset("utf8"); //After making the connection, and before any queries
//or $mysqli->set_charset( "utf8");
This makes the database read your input in UTF-8, and encode its output in UTF-8. You would also want to set your columns/tables/databases to UTF-8 as well.
Unicode escape sequences \uxxxx or \uhhhh\ullll or \Uxxxxxxxx are not supported in PHP.
\u2022 is the UTF-16 hex encoding for "Bullet". Not UTF-8.
You might also want to SET NAMES 'UTF-8'; or change charset before you open your database.
I'm creating a php application that involves sending chinese characters as url parameters.
I have to send query like :
http://xyz.com/?q=新
But the script at xyz.com won't automatically encode the chinese character. So, I need to explicitly send an encoded string as the paramter. It becomes:
http://xyz.com/?q=%E6%96%B0
The problem is, PHP won't encode the chinese character properly.
I've tried urlencode() and rawurlencode(). But they give %D0%C2 (doesn't work for my purpose) instead of %E6%96%B0 (works well with xyz.com) as the output.
I'm using this website to create the latter encoded string.
I've also defined header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=gb2312'); to display chinese characters properly.
Is there anything I can do to urlencode the chinese character properly?
Thanks!
PS: I'm a relatively new programmer and don't understand chinese.
You're URLencoding using the charset you specify in your header. %D0%C2 is 新 in gb2312; %E6%96%B0 is 新 in UTF-8. Switch your charset over to UTF-8 and you should fix this issue and still be able to display Simplified Chinese Han.
In order to reproduce your problem I created a simple PHP file:
<?php
var_dump(urlencode('新'));
?>
First I used UTF8 encoding and got %E6%96%B0. Afterwards I changed to GB2312 and got %D0%C2.
At http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ they seem to use JavaScript, that's UTF8 capable and therefore returns %E6%96%B0, too.
PS: When changing from GB2312 to UTF8 some editors might break code some internationalized code. So please make sure to have a copy of your file before converting!
I'm trying to compare some text to the text in a database. In the database any text with an accent is encoded like in HTML (i.e. é) when I compare the database text to my string it doesn't match because my string just shows é. When I use the PHP function htmlentities to encode the string first the é turns into é weird? Using htmlspecialchars doesn't encode the é at all.
How would you suggest I compare é to é as well as all the other accented characters?
You need to send in the correct charset to htmlentities. It looks like you're using UTF-8, but the default is ISO-8859-1. Change it like this:
$encoded = htmlentities($text, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
Another solution is to convert the text to ISO-8859-1 before encoding, but that may destroy information (ISO-8859-1 does not contain nearly as many characters as UTF-8). If you want to try that instead, do like this:
$encoded = htmlentities(utf8_decode($text));
I'm working on french site, and I also had same problem. This is the function that I use.
function convert_accent($string)
{
return htmlspecialchars_decode(htmlentities(utf8_decode($string)));
}
What it does it decodes your string to utf8, than converts everything HTML entities. even tags. But we want to convert tags back to normal, than htmlspecialchars_decode will convert them back. So in the end you will get a string with converted accents without touching tags.
You can use pass through this function your email content before sending it to recipent.
Another issue you might face is that, sometimes with this function the content from database converts to ? . In this case you should do this before running your query:
mysql_query("SET NAMES `utf8`");
But you might need to do it, it depends on encoding in your table. I hope it helps.
The comparing task is related to the charset and the collation you selected when you create the database or the tables. If you are saving strings with a lot of accents like spanish I sugget you to use charset uft8 and the collation could be the more accurate to the language(english, french or whatever) you're using.
The best thing of using the correct charset in the database is that you can save the string in natural way e.g: my name I can store it as is "Mario Juárez" and I have no need of doing some weird conversions.
Ran into similar issues recently. Followed Emil's answer and it worked fine locally but not on our dev/stage environments. I ended up using this and it worked all around:
$title = html_entity_decode(utf8_decode($item));
Thanks for leading me in the right direction!
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.