Since some days I read about Character-Encoding, I want to make all my Pages with UTF-8 for Compability. But I get stuck when I try to convert User-Input to UTF-8, this works on all Browsers, expect Internet-Explorer (like always).
I don't know whats wrong with my code, it seems fine to me.
I set the header with char encoding
I saved the file in UTF-8 (No BOM)
This happens only, if you try to access to the page via $_GET on the internet-Explorer myscript.php?c=äüöß
When I write down specialchars on my site, they would displayed correct.
This is my Code:
// User Input
$_GET['c'] = "äüöß"; // Access URL ?c=äüöß
//--------
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
$_GET = userToUtf8($_GET);
function userToUtf8($string) {
if(is_array($string)) {
$tmp = array();
foreach($string as $key => $value) {
$tmp[$key] = userToUtf8($value);
}
return $tmp;
}
return userDataUtf8($string);
}
function userDataUtf8($string) {
print("1: " . mb_detect_encoding($string) . "<br>"); // Shows: 1: UTF-8
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($string)); // Convert non UTF-8 String to UTF-8
print("2: " . mb_detect_encoding($string) . "<br>"); // Shows: 2: ASCII
$string = preg_replace('/[\xF0-\xF7].../s', '', $string);
print("3: " . mb_detect_encoding($string) . "<br>"); // Shows: 3: ASCII
return $string;
}
echo $_GET['c']; // Shows nothing
echo mb_detect_encoding($_GET['c']); // ASCII
echo "äöü+#"; // Shows "äöü+#"
The most confusing Part is, that it shows me, that's converted from UTF-8 to ASCII... Can someone tell me why it doesn't show me the specialchars correctly, whats wrong here? Or is this a Bug on the Internet-Explorer?
Edit:
If I disable converting it says, it's all UTF-8 but the Characters won't show to me either... They are displayed like "????"....
Note: This happens ONLY in the Internet-Explorer!
Although I prefer using urlencoded strings in address bar but for your case you can try to encode $_GET['c'] to utf8. Eg.
$_GET['c'] = utf8_encode($_GET['c']);
An approach to display the characters using IE 11.0.18 which worked:
Retrieve the Unicode of your character : example for 'ü' = 'U+00FC'
According to this post, convert it to utf8 entity
Decode it using utf8_decode before dumping
The line of code illustrating the example with the 'ü' character is :
var_dump(utf8_decode(html_entity_decode(preg_replace("/U\+([0-9A-F]{4})/", "&#x\\1;", 'U+00FC'), ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')));
To summarize: For displaying purposes, go from Unicode to UTF8 then decode it before displaying it.
Other resources:
a post to retrieve characters' unicode
I'm trying to check if a string is start with '€' or '£' in PHP.
Below are the codes
$text = "€123";
if($text[0] == "€"){
echo "true";
}
else{
echo "false";
}
//output false
If only check a single char, it works fine
$symbol = "€";
if($symbol == "€"){
echo "true";
}
else{
echo "false";
}
// output true
I have also tried to print the string on browser.
$text = "€123";
echo $text; //display euro symbol correctly
echo $text[0] //get a question mark
I have tried to use substr(), but the same problem occurred.
Characters, such as '€' or '£' are multi-byte characters. There is an excellent article that you can read here. According to the PHP docs, PHP strings are byte arrays. As a result, accessing or modifying a string using array brackets is not multi-byte safe, and should only be done with strings that are in a single-byte encoding such as ISO-8859-1.
Also make sure your file is encoded with UTF-8: you can use a text editor such as NotePad++ to convert it.
If I reduce the PHP to this, it works, the key being to use mb_substr:
<?php
header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$text = "€123";
echo mb_substr($text,0,1,'UTF-8');
?>
Finally, it would be a good idea to add the UTF-8 meta-tag in your head tag:
<meta charset="utf-8">
I suggest this as the easiest solution to you. Convert the symbols to their unicode identifiers using htmlentities().
htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
Which will either give you £ or €. Now that allows you to run a switch() {case:} statement to check. (Or your if statements)
$symbols = explode(";", $text);
switch($symbols[0]) {
case "£":
echo "It's Pounds";
break;
case "&euro":
echo "It's Euros";
break;
}
Working Example
This happens because you’re using a multi-byte character encoding (probably UTF-8) in which both € and £ are recorded using multiple bytes. That means that "€" is a string of three bytes, not just one.
When you use $text[0] you're getting only the first byte of the first character, and so it doesn't match the three bytes of "€". You need to get the first three bytes instead, to check whether one string starts with another.
Here’s the function I use to do that:
function string_starts_with($string, $prefix) {
return substr($string, 0, strlen($prefix)) == $prefix;
}
The question mark appears because the first byte of "€" isn’t enough to encode a whole character: the error is indicated by ‘�’ when available, otherwise ‘?’.
THE PROBLEM: I need a XML file "full encoded" by UTF8; that is, with no entity representing symbols, all symbols enconded by UTF8, except the only 3 ones that are XML-reserved, "&" (amp), "<" (lt) and ">" (gt). And, I need a build-in function that do it fast: to transform entities into real UTF8 characters (without corrupting my XML).
PS: it is a "real world problem" (!); at PMC/journals, for example, have 2.8 MILLION of scientific articles enconded with a special XML DTD (knowed also as JATS format)... To process as "usual XML-UTF8-text" we need to change from numeric entity to UTF8 char.
THE ATTEMPTED SOLUTION: the natural function to this task is html_entity_decode, but it destroys the XML code (!), transforming the reserved 3 XML-reserved symbols.
Illustrating the problem
Suppose
$xmlFrag ='<p>Hello world! Let A<B and A=∬dxdy</p>';
Where the entities 160 (nbsp) and x222C (double integral) must be transformed into UTF8, and the XML-reserved lt not. The XML text will be (after transformed),
$xmlFrag = '<p>Hello world! Let A<B and A=∬dxdy</p>';
The text "A<B" needs an XML-reserved character, so MUST stay as A<B.
Frustrated solutions
I try to use html_entity_decode for solve (directly!) the problem... So, I updated my PHP to v5.5 to try to use the ENT_XML1 option,
$s = html_entity_decode($xmlFrag, ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8'); // not working
// as I expected
Perhaps another question is, "WHY there are no other option to do what I expected?" -- it is important for many other XML applications (!), not only for me.
I not need a workaround as answer... Ok, I show my ugly function, perhaps it helps you to understand the problem,
function xml_entity_decode($s) {
// here an illustration (by user-defined function)
// about how the hypothetical PHP-build-in-function MUST work
static $XENTITIES = array('&','>','<');
static $XSAFENTITIES = array('#_x_amp#;','#_x_gt#;','#_x_lt#;');
$s = str_replace($XENTITIES,$XSAFENTITIES,$s);
//$s = html_entity_decode($s, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); // any php version
$s = html_entity_decode($s, ENT_HTML5|ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); // PHP 5.3+
$s = str_replace($XSAFENTITIES,$XENTITIES,$s);
return $s;
} // you see? not need a benchmark:
// it is not so fast as direct use of html_entity_decode; if there
// was an XML-safe option was ideal.
PS: corrected after this answer. Must be ENT_HTML5 flag, for convert really all named entities.
This question is creating, time-by-time, a "false answer" (see answers). This is perhaps because people not pay attention, and because there are NO ANSWER: there are a lack of PHP build-in solution.
... So, lets repeat my workaround (that is NOT an answer!) to not create more confusion:
The best workaround
Pay attention:
The function xml_entity_decode() below is the best (over any other) workaround.
The function below is not an answer to the present question, it is only a workwaround.
function xml_entity_decode($s) {
// illustrating how a (hypothetical) PHP-build-in-function MUST work
static $XENTITIES = array('&','>','<');
static $XSAFENTITIES = array('#_x_amp#;','#_x_gt#;','#_x_lt#;');
$s = str_replace($XENTITIES,$XSAFENTITIES,$s);
$s = html_entity_decode($s, ENT_HTML5|ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); // PHP 5.3+
$s = str_replace($XSAFENTITIES,$XENTITIES,$s);
return $s;
}
To test and to demonstrate that you have a better solution, please test first with this simple benckmark:
$countBchMk_MAX=1000;
$xml = file_get_contents('sample1.xml'); // BIG and complex XML string
$start_time = microtime(TRUE);
for($countBchMk=0; $countBchMk<$countBchMk_MAX; $countBchMk++){
$A = xml_entity_decode($xml); // 0.0002
/* 0.0014
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadXML($xml, LIBXML_DTDLOAD | LIBXML_NOENT);
$doc->encoding = 'UTF-8';
$A = $doc->saveXML();
*/
}
$end_time = microtime(TRUE);
echo "\n<h1>END $countBchMk_MAX BENCKMARKs WITH ",
($end_time - $start_time)/$countBchMk_MAX,
" seconds</h1>";
Use the DTD when loading the JATS XML document, as it will define any mapping from named entities to Unicode characters, then set the encoding to UTF-8 when saving:
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->load($inputFile, LIBXML_DTDLOAD | LIBXML_NOENT);
$doc->encoding = 'UTF-8';
$doc->save($outputFile);
I had the same problem because someone used HTML templates to create XML, instead of using SimpleXML. sigh... Anyway, I came up with the following. It's not as fast as yours, but it's not an order of magnitude slower, and it is less hacky. Yours will inadvertently convert #_x_amp#; to $amp;, however unlikely its presence in the source XML.
Note: I'm assuming default encoding is UTF-8
// Search for named entities (strings like "&abc1;").
echo preg_replace_callback('#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i', function ($matches) {
// Decode the entity and re-encode as XML entities. This means "&"
// will remain "&" whereas "€" becomes "€".
return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($matches[0]), ENT_XML1);
}, "<Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo>") . "\n";
/* <Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo> */
Also, if you want to replace special characters with numbered entities (in case you don't want a UTF-8 XML), you can easily add a function to the above code:
// Search for named entities (strings like "&abc1;").
$xml_utf8 = preg_replace_callback('#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i', function ($matches) {
// Decode the entity and re-encode as XML entities. This means "&"
// will remain "&" whereas "€" becomes "€".
return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($matches[0]), ENT_XML1);
}, "<Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo>") . "\n";
echo mb_encode_numericentity($xml_utf8, [0x80, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff]);
/* <Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo> */
In your case you want it the other way around. Encode numbered entities as UTF-8:
// Search for named entities (strings like "&abc1;").
$xml_utf8 = preg_replace_callback('#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i', function ($matches) {
// Decode the entity and re-encode as XML entities. This means "&"
// will remain "&" whereas "€" becomes "€".
return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($matches[0]), ENT_XML1);
}, "<Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo>") . "\n";
// Encodes (uncaught) numbered entities to UTF-8.
echo mb_decode_numericentity($xml_utf8, [0x80, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff]);
/* <Foo>€&foo Ç</Foo> */
Benchmark
I've added a benchmark for good measure. This also demonstrates the flaw in your solution for clarity. Below is the input string I used.
<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>
Your method
php -r '$q=["&",">","<"];$y=["#_x_amp#;","#_x_gt#;","#_x_lt#;"]; $s=microtime(1); for(;++$i<1000000;)$r=str_replace($y,$q,html_entity_decode(str_replace($q,$y,"<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>"),ENT_HTML5|ENT_NOQUOTES)); $t=microtime(1)-$s; echo"$r\n=====\nTime taken: $t\n";'
<Foo>€&foo Ç é & ∬</Foo>
=====
Time taken: 2.0397531986237
My method
php -r '$s=microtime(1); for(;++$i<1000000;)$r=preg_replace_callback("#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i",function($m){return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($m[0]),ENT_XML1);},"<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>"); $t=microtime(1)-$s; echo"$r\n=====\nTime taken: $t\n";'
<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>
=====
Time taken: 4.045273065567
My method (with unicode to numbered entity):
php -r '$s=microtime(1); for(;++$i<1000000;)$r=mb_encode_numericentity(preg_replace_callback("#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i",function($m){return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($m[0]),ENT_XML1);},"<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>"),[0x80,0xffff,0,0xffff]); $t=microtime(1)-$s; echo"$r\n=====\nTime taken: $t\n";'
<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>
=====
Time taken: 5.4407880306244
My method (with numbered entity to unicode):
php -r '$s=microtime(1); for(;++$i<1000000;)$r=mb_decode_numericentity(preg_replace_callback("#&[A-Z0-9]+;#i",function($m){return htmlentities(html_entity_decode($m[0]),ENT_XML1);},"<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#;</Foo>"),[0x80,0xffff,0,0xffff]); $t=microtime(1)-$s; echo"$r\n=====\nTime taken: $t\n";'
<Foo>€&foo Ç é #_x_amp#; ∬</Foo>
=====
Time taken: 5.5400078296661
public function entity_decode($str, $charset = NULL)
{
if (strpos($str, '&') === FALSE)
{
return $str;
}
static $_entities;
isset($charset) OR $charset = $this->charset;
$flag = is_php('5.4')
? ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML5
: ENT_COMPAT;
do
{
$str_compare = $str;
// Decode standard entities, avoiding false positives
if ($c = preg_match_all('/&[a-z]{2,}(?![a-z;])/i', $str, $matches))
{
if ( ! isset($_entities))
{
$_entities = array_map('strtolower', get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, $flag, $charset));
// If we're not on PHP 5.4+, add the possibly dangerous HTML 5
// entities to the array manually
if ($flag === ENT_COMPAT)
{
$_entities[':'] = ':';
$_entities['('] = '(';
$_entities[')'] = '&rpar';
$_entities["\n"] = '&newline;';
$_entities["\t"] = '&tab;';
}
}
$replace = array();
$matches = array_unique(array_map('strtolower', $matches[0]));
for ($i = 0; $i < $c; $i++)
{
if (($char = array_search($matches[$i].';', $_entities, TRUE)) !== FALSE)
{
$replace[$matches[$i]] = $char;
}
}
$str = str_ireplace(array_keys($replace), array_values($replace), $str);
}
// Decode numeric & UTF16 two byte entities
$str = html_entity_decode(
preg_replace('/(&#(?:x0*[0-9a-f]{2,5}(?![0-9a-f;]))|(?:0*\d{2,4}(?![0-9;])))/iS', '$1;', $str),
$flag,
$charset
);
}
while ($str_compare !== $str);
return $str;
}
For those coming here because your numeric entity in the range 128 to 159 remains as numeric entity instead of being converted to a character:
echo xml_entity_decode('');
//Output instead expected €
This depends on PHP version (at least for PHP >=5.6 the entity remains) and on the affected characters. The reason is that the characters 128 to 159 are not printable characters in UTF-8. This can happen if the data to be converted mix up windows-1252 content (where is the € sign).
Try this function:
function xmlsafe($s,$intoQuotes=1) {
if ($intoQuotes)
return str_replace(array('&','>','<','"'), array('&','>','<','"'), $s);
else
return str_replace(array('&','>','<'), array('&','>','<'), html_entity_decode($s));
}
example usage:
echo '<k nid="'.$node->nid.'" description="'.xmlsafe($description).'"/>';
also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9446666/2312709
this code used in production seem that no problems happened with UTF-8
I have website that's in win-1251 encoding and it needs to stay that way. But I also need to be able to echo few links that contain non latin, non cyrillic characters like šžāņūī...
I need a function that convert this
"māja un man tā patīk"
to
"māja un man tā patīk"
and that does not touch html, so if there is <b> it needs to stay as <b>, not > or <
And please no advices about the encoding and how wrong that is.
$str = "<b>Obāchan</b> おばあちゃん";
$str = preg_replace_callback('/./u', function ($matches) {
$chr = $matches[0];
if (strlen($chr) > 1) {
$chr = mb_convert_encoding($chr, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8');
}
return $chr;
}, $str);
This expects the original $str to be UTF-8 encoded, i.e. your PHP file should be saved in UTF-8. It encodes all non-ASCII compatible code points to HTML entities. Since all HTML special characters are ASCII characters, they remain untouched. The resulting string is pure ASCII. Since the lower Win-1251 code points are ASCII compatible, the resulting string is also a valid Win-1251 string. The above $str converts to:
<b>Obāchan</b> おばあちゃん
The main things you probably don't want to encode are <, > and &. Those are really the only special characters. So how about encoding everything first, and then just decode <, > and & I feel you should be fine.
This is untested:
$output =
htmlspecialchars_decode(
htmlentities($input, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'CP-1251')
);
let me know
What Evert suggest looks logical to me too! If you insist this is a way to do it if there are only two letters that bother you. For more letters the scrit will not be as effective and needs to change.
<?PHP
function myConvert($str)
{
$chars['ā']='ā';
$chars['ī']='ī';
foreach ($chars as $key => $value)
$output = str_replace($key, $value, $str);
echo $str;
}
myConvert("māja un man tā patīk");
?>
==================edited==============
For many characters maybe this one can help you:
<?PHP
function myConvert($str)
{
$final=null;
$parts = preg_split("/&#[0-9]*;/i", $str);//get all text parts
preg_match_all("/&#[0-9]*;/i", $str, $delimiters );//get delimiters;
$delimiters[0][]='';//make arrays equal size
foreach($parts as $key => $value)
$final.=$value.mb_convert_encoding
($delimiters[0][$key], "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES");
return $final;
}
$fh = fopen("testFile.txt", 'w') ;
fwrite($fh, myConvert("māja un man tā patīkī"));
fclose($fh);
?>
The desired output is written in the text file. This code, exactly as it is -not merged in some project- does what it claims to do. Converts codes like ā to the analogous character they present.
I have Chinese users of my PHP web application who enter products into our system. The information the’re entering is for example a product title and price.
We would like to use the product title to generate a nice URL slug for those product.
Seems like we cannot just use Chinese as HREF attributes.
Does anyone know how we handle a title like “婴儿服饰” so that we can generate a clean url like http://www.site.com/婴儿服饰 ?
Everything works fine for “normal” languages, but high UTF‐8 languages give us problems.
Also, when generating the clean URL, we want to keep SEO in mind, but I have no experience with Chinese in that matter.
If your string is already UTF-8, just use rawurlencode to encode the string properly:
$path = '婴儿服饰';
$url = 'http://example.com/'.rawurlencode($path);
UTF-8 is the preferred character encoding for non-ASCII characters (although only ASCII characters are allowed in URIs which is why you need to use the percent-encoding). The result is the same as in tchrist’s example:
http://example.com/%E5%A9%B4%E5%84%BF%E6%9C%8D%E9%A5%B0
This code, which uses the CPAN module, URI::Escape:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.10;
use utf8;
use URI::Escape qw(uri_escape_utf8);
my $url = "http://www.site.com/";
my $path = "婴儿服饰";
say $url, uri_escape_utf8($path);
when run, prints:
http://www.site.com/%E5%A9%B4%E5%84%BF%E6%9C%8D%E9%A5%B0
Is that what you're looking for?
BTW, those four characters are:
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5A74
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-513F
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-670D
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-9970
Which, according to the Unicode::Unihan database, seems to be yīng ér fú shì, or perhaps just ying er fú shi per Lingua::ZH::Romanize::Pinyin. And maybe even jing¹ jan⁴ fuk⁶ sik¹ or jing˥ jan˨˩ fuk˨ sik˥, using the Cantonese version from Unicode::Unihan.
Use encoded url as href attribute of the link, and keep original characters as content of the link.
Then you could have the safe url and make the webpage SEO friendly.
// Safely convert url like "http://example.com/婴儿服饰" to valid encoded string
// => http://example.com/%E5%A9%B4%E5%84%BF%E6%9C%8D%E9%A5%B0
// KEY: multipart character occupies more than one byte
function autoEncodeMultibyteChars($url) {
$encoding = 'UTF-8';
$mbLen = mb_strlen($url, $encoding);
$append = '';
for ($idx = 0; $idx < $mbLen; $idx++) {
$char = mb_substr($url, $idx, 1, $encoding);
if (strlen($char) > 1) { // multibyte char
$append .= rawurlencode($char);
} else {
$append .= $char;
}
}
return $append;
}