I have a large file that contains world countries/regions that I'm seperating into smaller files based on individual countries/regions. The original file contains entries like:
EE.04 Järvamaa
EE.05 Jõgevamaa
EE.07 Läänemaa
However when I extract that and write it to a new file, the text becomes:
EE.04 Järvamaa
EE.05 Jõgevamaa
EE.07 Läänemaa
To save my files I'm using the following code:
mb_detect_encoding($text, "UTF-8") == "UTF-8" ? : $text = utf8_encode($text);
$fp = fopen(MY_LOCATION,'wb');
fwrite($fp,$text);
fclose($fp);
I tried saving the files with and without utf8_encode() and neither seems to work. How would I go about saving the original encoding (which is UTF8)?
Thank you!
First off, don't depend on mb_detect_encoding. It's not great at figuring out what the encoding is unless there's a bunch of encoding specific entities (meaning entities that are invalid in other encodings).
Try just getting rid of the mb_detect_encoding line all together.
Oh, and utf8_encode turns a Latin-1 string into a UTF-8 string (not from an arbitrary charset to UTF-8, which is what you really want)... You want iconv, but you need to know the source encoding (and since you can't really trust mb_detect_encoding, you'll need to figure it out some other way).
Or you can try using iconv with a empty input encoding $str = iconv('', 'UTF-8', $str); (which may or may not work)...
It doesn't work like that. Even if you utf8_encode($theString) you will not CREATE a UTF8 file.
The correct answer has something to do with the UTF-8 byte-order mark.
This to understand the issue:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
- http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html
The solution is the following:
As the UTF-8 byte-order mark is '\xef\xbb\xbf' we should add it to the document's header.
<?php
function writeStringToFile($file, $string){
$f=fopen($file, "wb");
$file="\xEF\xBB\xBF".$string; // utf8 bom
fputs($f, $string);
fclose($f);
}
?>
The $file could be anything text or xml...
The $string is your UTF8 encoded string.
Try it now and it will write a UTF8 encoded file with your UTF8 content (string).
writeStringToFile('test.xml', 'éèàç');
Maybe you want to call htmlentities($text) before writing it into file and html_entity_decode($fetchedData) before output. It'll work with Scandinavian letters.
It appears that your source file is not, in fact, in UTF-8. You might want to try using the same approach you've been using, but with a different encoding, such as UTF-16 perhaps.
You can do it as follows:
<?php
$s = "This is a string éèàç and it is in utf-8";
$f = fopen('myFile',"w");
fwrite($f, utf8_encode($s));
fclose($f);
?>
Related
I'm trying to save text file as UTF-8 by using Laravel's Storage facade. Unfortunately couldn't find a way and it saves as us-ascii. How can I save as UTF-8?
Currently I'm using following code to save file;
Storage::disk('public')->put('files/test.txt", $fileData);
You should be able to append "\xEF\xBB\xBF" (the BOM which defines it as UTF-8) to your $fileData. So:
Storage::disk('public')->put('files/test.txt", "\xEF\xBB\xBF" . $fileData);
There are other ways to convert your text before writing it to the file, but this is the simplest and easiest to read and execute. As far as I know, there is also no character encoding methods within Illuminate\Filesystem\Filesystem.
For more information: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9047876/823549 and What's different between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?.
ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so all ASCII files are already UTF-8 encoded. The bytes in the ASCII file and the bytes that would result from "encoding it to UTF-8" would be exactly the same bytes. There's no difference between them, so there's no need to do anything.
It looks like your problem is that the files are not actually ASCII. You need to determine what encoding they are using, and transcode them properly.
I recommend using mb_convert_encoding instead
$fileData = mb_convert_encoding($fileData, "UTF-8", "auto");
Storage::disk('public')->put('files/test.txt", $fileData);
How can I set a text file ENCODING (for instance UTF-8) in PHP?
Let me show you my problem. This is my code:
<?php
file_put_contents('test.txt', $data); // data is some non-English text with UTF-8 charset
?>
Output: اÙ!
fwrite() has the similar output.
But when I create the test.txt by notepad and set the charset UTF-8 the output is what I want.
I wanna set the charset in the PHP file.
Now this is my question: How to set text file encoding by PHP?
PHP does not apply an encoding when storing text in a file: it stores data exactly as it is laid out in the string.
You mention that you have problems opening the file in notepad.exe. That text editor is not very good at guessing the encoding of the file you are opening; if the text is encoded in UTF-8 you must choose to open it as UTF-8. Use another text editor if possible. Notepad++ is a popular replacement.
If you must use notepad.exe, as a last resort, write a Byte Order Mark to the file before you write anything else; this will make it recognize the file as UTF-8 while potentially making the file unusable for other purposes (see the Wikipedia article for details).
file_put_contents("file.txt", "\xEF\xBB\xBF" . $data);
You may try this using mb_convert_encoding
$data = mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', 'auto');
file_put_contents('test.txt', $data);
Also check iconv.
Update : (try this and find the right encoding for your text)
foreach(mb_list_encodings() as $chr){
echo mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', $chr)." : ".$chr."<br>";
}
Also, try this on GitHub.
Try:
file_put_contents('test.txt', utf8_encode($data));
You can create a function which converts a string array into a utf8 encoded string array and another to decode and write to a notepad file for you.
<?php
function utf8_string_encode(&$array){
$myencode = function(&$value,&$key){
if(is_string($value)){
$value = utf8_encode($value);
}
if(is_string($key)){
$key = utf8_encode($key);
}
if(is_array($value)){
utf8_string_encode($value);
}
};
array_walk($array,$func);
return $array;
}
?>
I create csv file with fputcsv. I want csv file to be in windows1251 ecnding. But can't find the solution. How can I do that?
Cheers
Default encoding for an excel file is machine specific ANSI, mainly windows1252. But since you are creating that file and maybe inserting UTF-8 characters, that file is not going to be handled ok.
You could use iconv() when creating the file. Eg:
function encodeCSV(&$value, $key){
$value = iconv('UTF-8', 'Windows-1252', $value);
}
array_walk($values, 'encodeCSV');
It's Working: Enjoy
use this before fputcsv:
$line = array_map("utf8_decode", $line);
The file will be in whatever encoding your strings are in. PHP strings are raw byte arrays, their encodings depends on wherever the bytes came from. If you just read them from your source code files, they're in whatever you saved your source code as. If they're from a database, they're in whatever encoding the database connection was set to.
If you need to convert from one encoding to another, use iconv. If you need more in-depth information, see here:
What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text
Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App
fputs( $fp, $bom = chr(0xEF) . chr(0xBB) . chr(0xBF) );
Try this it worked for me!!!
Try the iconv function:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php
To transform the members of the array you're passing to the fputcsv function to the encoding you want.
$string = iconv(mb_detect_encoding($string), 'Windows-1252//TRANSLIT', $string);
i just started dabbling in php and i'm afraid i need some help to figure out how to manipulate utf-8 strings.
I'm working in ubuntu 11.10 x86, php version 5.3.6-13ubuntu3.2. I have a utf-8 encoded file (vim :set encoding confirms this) which i then proceed to reading it using
$file = fopen("file.txt", "r");
while(!feof($file)){
$line = fgets($file);
//...
}
fclose($file);
using mb_detect_encoding($line) reports UTF-8
If i do echo $line I can see the line properly (no mangled characters) in the browser
so I guess everything is fine with browser and apache. Though i did search my apache configuration for AddDefaultCharset and tried adding http meta-tags for character encoding (just in case)
When i try to split the string using $arr = mb_split(';',$line) the fields of the resulting array contain mangled utf-8 characters (mb_detect_encoding($arr[0]) reports utf-8 as well).
So echo $arr[0] will result in something like this: ΑΘΗÎÎ.
I have tried setting mb_detect_order('utf-8'), mb_internal_encoding('utf-8'), but nothing changed. I also tried to manually detect utf-8 using this w3 perl regex because i read somewhere that mb_detect_encoding can sometimes fail (myth?), but results were the same as well.
So my question is how can i properly split the string? Is going down the mb_ path the wrong way? What am I missing?
Thank you for your help!
UPDATE: I'm adding sample strings and base64 equivalents (thanks to #chris' for his suggestion)
1. original string: "ΑΘΗΝΑ;ΑΙΓΑΛΕΩ;12242;37.99452;23.6889"
2. base64 encoded: "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkTvOkc6ZzpPOkc6bzpXOqTsxMjI0MjszNy45OTQ1MjsyMy42ODg5"
3. first part (the equivalent of "ΑΘΗΝΑ") base64 encoded before splitting: "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkQ=="
4. first part ($arr[0] after splitting): "ΑΘΗÎΑ"
5. first part after splitting base64 encoded: "77u/zpHOmM6Xzp3OkQ=="
Ok, so after doing this there seems to be a 77u/ difference between 3. and 5. which according to this is a utf-8 BOM mark. So how can i avoid it?
UPDATE 2: I woke up refreshed today and with your tips in mind i tried it again. It seems that $line=fgets($file) reads correctly the first line (no mangled chars), and fails for each subsequent line. So then i base64_encoded the first and second line, and the 77u/ bom appeared on the base64'd string of the first line only. I then opened up the offending file in vim, and entered :set nobomb :w to save the file without the bom. Firing up php again showed that the first line was also mangled now. Based on #hakre's remove_utf8_bom i added it's complementary function
function add_utf8_bom($str){
$bom= "\xEF\xBB\xBF";
return substr($str,0,3)===$bom?$str:$bom.$str;
}
and voila each line is read correctly now.
I do not much like this solution, as it seems very very hackish (i can't believe that an entire framework/language does not provide for a way to deal with nobombed strings). So do you know of an alternate approach? Otherwise I'll proceed with the above.
Thanks to #chris, #hakre and #jacob for their time!
UPDATE 3 (solution): It turns out after all that it was a browser thing: it was not enough to add header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') and meta-tags like <meta http-equiv="Content-type" value="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />. It also had to be properly enclosed inside an <html><body> section or the browser would not understand the encoding correctly. Thanks to #jake for his suggestion.
Morale of the story: I should learn more about html before trying coding for the browser in the first place. Thanks for your help and patience everyone.
UTF-8 has the very nice feature that it is ASCII-compatible. With this I mean that:
ASCII characters stay the same when encoded to UTF-8
no other characters will be encoded to ASCII characters
This means that when you try to split a UTF-8 string by the semicolon character ;, which is an ASCII character, you can just use standard single byte string functions.
In your example, you can just use explode(';',$utf8encodedText) and everything should work as expected.
PS: Since the UTF-8 encoding is prefix-free, you can actually use explode() with any UTF-8 encoded separator.
PPS: It seems like you try to parse a CSV file. Have a look at the fgetcsv() function. It should work perfectly on UTF-8 encoded strings as long as you use ASCII characters for separators, quotes, etc.
When you write debug/testing scripts in php, make sure you output a more or less valid HTML page.
I like to use a PHP file similar to the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=utf-8>
<title>Test page for project XY</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Test Page</h1>
<pre><?php
echo print_r($_GET,1);
?></pre>
</body>
</html>
If you don't include any HTML tags, the browser might interpret the file as a text file and all kinds of weird things could happen. In your case, I assume the browser interpreted the file as a Latin1 encoded text file. I assume it worked with the BOM, because whenever the BOM was present, the browser recognized the file as a UTF-8 file.
Edit, I just read your post closer. You're suggesting this should output false, because you're suggesting a BOM was introduced by mb_split().
header('content-type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');
$s = "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkTvOkc6ZzpPOkc6bzpXOqTsxMjI0MjszNy45OTQ1MjsyMy42ODg5";
$str = base64_decode($s);
$peices = mb_split(';', $str);
var_dump(substr($str, 0, 10) === $peices[0]);
var_dump($peices);
Does it? It works as expected for me( bool true, and the strings in the array are correct)
The mb_splitDocs function should be fine, but you should define the charset it's using as well with mb_regex_encodingDocs:
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
About mb_detect_encodingDocs: it can fail, but that's just by the fact that you can never detect an encoding. You either know it or you can try but that's all. Encoding detection is mostly a gambling game, however you can use the strict parameter with that function and specify the encoding(s) you're looking for.
How to remove the BOM mask:
You can filter the string input and remove a UTF-8 bom with a small helper function:
/**
* remove UTF-8 BOM if string has it at the beginning
*
* #param string $str
* #return string
*/
function remove_utf8_bom($str)
{
if ($bytes = substr($str, 0, 3) && $bytes === "\xEF\xBB\xBF")
{
$str = substr($str, 3);
}
return $str;
}
Usage:
$line = remove_utf8_bom($line);
There are probably better ways to do it, but this should work.
I have a problem where users upload zipped text files. After I extract text contents I import them in mysql database. But later when I display the text in browser some characters are garbled. I tried to encode them but I am unable to detect the encoding of the text files with PHP and convert to UTF-8 with iconv or mbstring.
Mysql database charset is UTF-8.
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
is added.
Tried with
iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $text_file_contents)
But it simply removes the garbled chars: � which should be either ' or " when I checked manually with Firefox browser. Firefox showed that is ISO-8859-1 but I can not check for every article they send (articles may be in different character set).
How to convert this characters to UTF-8 ?
EDIT:
This is a modified function I found on
http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-detect-encoding.php
origanlly written by prgss at bk dot ru .
function myutf8_detect_encoding($string, $default = 'UTF-8', $encode = 0, $encode_to = 'UTF-8') {
static $list = array('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', 'ASCII', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1251', 'latin1', 'windows-1252', 'windows-1253', 'windows-1254', 'windows-1255', 'windows-1256', 'windows-1257', 'windows-1258', 'ISO-8859-2', 'ISO-8859-3', 'GBK', 'GB2312', 'GB18030', 'MACROMAN', 'ISO-8859-4', 'ISO-8859-5', 'ISO-8859-6', 'ISO-8859-7', 'ISO-8859-8', 'ISO-8859-9', 'ISO-8859-10', 'ISO-8859-11', 'ISO-8859-12', 'ISO-8859-13', 'ISO-8859-14', 'ISO-8859-15', 'ISO-8859-16');
foreach ($list as $item) {
$sample = iconv($item, $item, $string);
if (md5($sample) == md5($string)) {
if ($encode == 1)
return iconv($item, $encode_to, $string);
else
return $item;
}
}
if ($encode == 1)
return iconv($encode_to, $encode_to . '//IGNORE', $string);
else
return $default;
}
and in my code I use:
myutf8_detect_encoding(trim($description), 'UTF-8', 1)
but it still returns garbled characters of this text “old is gold’’ .
This is indeed tricky.
Detecting an arbitrary string's encoding using detect_encoding... is known to be not very reliable (although it should be able to distinguish between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 for example - make sure you give it a try first.)
If the auto-detection doesn't work out, there is the option of displaying the content to the user before it gets submitted, along with a drop-down menu to switch between the most used encodings. Then show a message like
Please check your submission. If you are seeing incorrect or garbled characters, please change the encoding in the drop-down menu until the content is correct.
Whenever the user changes the drop-down value, your script will pull the content again, use iconv() to convert it from the specified encoding to UTF-8, and output the result, until it looks good.
This needs some finesse in designing the User Interface to be understandable for the end user, but it would often be the best option. Especially if you are dealing with users from many different regions or continents with a lot of different encodings.
Having had the same problem of encoding detection, I made a php function that outputs different information about the string and should make it relatively easy to identify the encoding used.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.ord.php (function hex_chars by "manixrock(hat)gmail(doink)com").
It shows the values of the characters inside the string, as well as the values of each individual byte. You look at the output and see which of your suspected encodings matches the bytes. You should first familiarize yourself with the various popular encodings like UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-X (understand their byte storage). Also make sure you test the string as unaltered as possible (take care how the encoding might change between what PHP outputs and what the browser receives, how the browser displays, or if you get the string from another source like MySQL or a file how that may change the encoding).
This helped me detect that a text had undergone the conversions: (UTF-8 to byte[]) then (ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8). That function helped a lot. Hope it helps you.
Use mb_detect_encoding to find out what encoding is used, then iconv to convert.
Try to insert right after the mysql connection:
mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");