problem injecting UTF8 encoded JSONP into a Win 1255 encoded webpage - php

I am developing a third-party service embedded in websites as a JS snippet, that amongst other things need to fetch some jsonp data from my PHP server, and display the text contained in the json object on the hosting embedding website.
I am using jQuery, so I issue the following .getJSON request:
$.getJSON("http://localhost/php/server.php?a=gfs"+"&callback=?",function(Obj) {
doSomething(Obj);
});
and on the PHP side (server.php) I have:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf8');
$retval = file_get_contents('../scripts/file.json');
//change to json php
$callback = $_GET['callback'];
echo $callback . '(' . $retval . ')';
?>
These work perfectly in FF, but fail in IE when the embedding website is encoded with something different than utf8, specifically a Windows 1255 (Hebrew) web page, in the sense that the text contained in file.json is displayed as gibberish. Changing the encoding of the website (in the browser, not the source) to unicode "fixes" the problem with the displayed text from the json, while of course makes the rest of the page look like gibberish... I had a similar problem with FF, before I added the header(...) line to the php script.
What should I do? Does anyone know why it works well in FF and not in IE? Is there an additional definition such as the header(...) one required for IE specifically?
Constraints:
I have no control on the embedding website
file.json has to be encoded in utf8 (that's how my db works)
The same code needs to be able to handle both utf8 encoded pages and non utf8 pages

urgh.
It seems that the fix for IE is changing the header definition from:
header('Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf8');
to
header('Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8');
yep, the missing "-" in the charset name. turns ot the utf8 (without the dash) is not understood by IE, while it is understood by FF.
The joy.
Hope this might prove helpful to someone, sometime, and save some wasted time.

Related

symbols displayed at run time but not present in code

I am creating a site with html and php.
When I Run my php page on borwser using localhost(XAMPP server), then some symbols () are displayed but when I check my html-php code, then no symbol or script like: ¿ or » is found.
If i am wrong somewhere then Please let me know.
That's a UTF-8 byte-order marker. You should configure your editor to save UTF-8 without BOM. It isn't mandatory for the UTF-8 encoding; in fact, its use is discouraged and it only causes problems.
Additionally, make sure your web server is sending an appropriate Content-Type HTTP header:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
¿ or » are html entities, they are looks different at php code and at browser. You can find them, for example, here. Also, you possibly have an issue with BOM
My best guess: You have an issue with encoding (UTF vs. ISO). Look up encoding used by your editor on saving, and send it to the browser like i.e. header("Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8")
sounds like you're dealing with a character encoding problem.
try to declare the encoding in your headers.
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8")
this needs to be output before any text is sent to the client.

Encoding issue with Apache , displaying diamond characters in browser

Request you all to help me set up Apache server on Cent OS. It looks like some encoding issue, but I am not able to resolve it yet.
Instead of HTML content it displays HTML source in (chrome,firefox), IE 9 works fine. It displays � character after each "<" symbol.
http://pdf.gen.in/index1.htm
Second Problem is with PHP. It displays source code of PHP http://pdf.gen.in/index.php with similar diamond characters, wherever it encounters a "<" character. It seems like php issue is related to the first issue.
Those files are encoded with UTF-16LE. For the static HTML page, you might be able to get it to work by setting the charset correctly in the MIME type (it's currently text/html; charset=UTF-8). I don't know how strong PHP's Unicode support is. Try using UTF-8 instead, it's generally more well supported due to its partial overlap with ASCII.
You should use a decent text editor, and always set encoding of php/html to "UTF-8 without BOM".
Create a file named "test.php", paste below codes and save with "UTF-8 without BOM" encoding, then it will work just fine.
<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Posting and returning data using jquery corrupts å ä ö

This is a question with a lot of information on the net. Still, I haven't solved it.
I am having a dynamically loaded form on a web page. I submit it using jquery $.post. My page is for Swedes so it needs to work with åäö.
When posting data to server, it will then load the data back into a new table. The returned å ä ö is corrupted. Example åååäääööö = åååäääööö
The server side is php. I encode all pages that return content to the browser like this:
<?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1'); ?>
I have tried utf8_encode and utf8_decode on the server side. No difference actually.
And i tried this: encodeURIComponent($(this).serialize()) where $(this) is the form to be submitted. Of course, this doesn't work and I don't know how to encode an object like $(this).
I thought that this is something that a lot of people does, but it doesn't seem to be a standard solution.
Hence, what I need help with is how can I post a form using javascript/jquery/etc. and handle it on the server side, returning it and å ä ö looks as they should. It's totally fine if the server receives utf8. Should the principle be to only use UTF8 and then the problem is solved? Seems like there should be another solution.
AJAX uses UTF-8 encoding. If your data is not in UTF-8 format (such as Windows 1251 or ISO-8859-1) you're going to have trouble.
Specifying a different encoding scheme in the header doesn't convert your data to UTF-8. It just tells the client what to expect.
My Motto: UTF-8 end-to-end or die!

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.

PHP: Current encoding used to send data to the browser

How can I know what encoding will be used by PHP when sending data to the browser? I.e. with the Cotent-Type header, for instance: iso-8859-1.
Usually Apache + PHP servers of webhosters are configured to send out NO charset header.
The shortest way to test how your server is configured are these:
Use this tool to see the server header by getting any one of your pages on your webiste.
If in the server headers you see a charset it means your server is using it, usually it won't contain a charset.
Another way is to run this simple script on your server: <?php echo ini_get('default_charset'); ?> As said above this usually prints out an empty string, if different it will show you the charset of the PHP.
The 2nd solution is supposing Apache is not configured with AddDefaultCharset some_charset which is not usually the case, but in such case I'm afraid Apache setting might override PHP deafult_charset ini directive.
You can use the header() solution that William suggested, however if you are running Apache, and the Apache config is using a default charset, that will win everytime (Internet Explorer will go crazy) See: AddDefaultCharset
Keep in mind that content-types and encodings are two different things. text/html is a content-type; ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 are encodings.
The HTTP response header that the server sends typically looks like this:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
"charset" is actually the character encoding. It's not in a separate header; however there is a header called "Content-Encoding" which actually specifies what kind of compression the response uses (e.g. gzip).
If you want to change the character encoding to UTF-8, in a file that contains HTML:
<?
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
You can set your own with header('Content-type: xxx/yyy');, but I believe that text/html is sent by default.
AFAIK, PHP sends strings bytewise. that is, if your variables hold UTF-8, it will send UTF-8. if you have iso-8859-1, it will send that too. if you mix them, it won't be pretty.
If your server is not configured to have a default content or charset, and neither is PHP, PHP will send only Content-Type: text/html - it won't specify a charset at all, and will send the bytes as it sees them in the script.
If a browser receives a page without charset specified, various things can happen:
most browsers have an "Encoding/Charset" menu; if the user explicitly selects one, the browser will try to apply it. Doesn't happen too often, so:
some browsers try to render it with a default charset (which is locale-dependent, e.g. for FF and cs_CZ it used to be iso-8859-2; YMMV)
IE will try to determine the charset heuristically (it will take a guess, based on character distribution - and many times it gets it right; sometimes it gets it wrong and you get a page in Romanian interpreted as Chinese text, which usually means "unreadable")
some old browsers will fall back on us-ascii
If with this procedure, the PHP script's charset and the browser's charset matches, the text will - accidentally - be readable. If not, there will be weird signs and similar phenomena.

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