For some reason i get a £76756687 weird character when i type a £ into a text field on my form?
As you suspect, it's a character encoding issue - is the page set to use a charset of UTF-8? (You can't go wrong with this encoding really.) Also, you'll probably want to entity encode the pound symbol on the way out (£)
As an example character set (for both the form page and HTML email) you could use:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
That said, is there a good reason for the user to have to enter the currency symbol? Would it be a better idea to have it as either a static text item or a drop down to the left of the text field? (Feel free to ignore if I'm talking arse and you're using a freeform textarea or summat.)
You’re probably using UTF-8 as character encoding but don’t declare your output correctly. Because the £ character (U+00A3) is encoded in UTF-8 with 0xC2A3. And that byte sequence represents the two characters  and £ when interpreted with ISO 8859-1.
So you just need to specify your character encoding correctly. In PHP you can use the header function to set the proper value for Content-Type header field like:
header('Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8');
But make sure that you call this function before any output. Otherwise the HTTP header is already sent and you cannot modify it.
Related
I have a few symbols in my description like  ⠀ and so on. Can I do anything about it? Or if it's in database, I can't do nothing now?
It sort of depends what the problem actually is...
If it's that those characters are supposed to be there (such as "Mañana" in Spanish) then you'll need to ensure everything is in UTF-8... the best way is to:
1: check the database tables are in "utf-8" encoding (if not convert them to utf-8)
2: as Martin noted, ensure the database connector is utf-8 using something like:
mysql_set_charset('utf8'); //note that MySQL uses no hyphen here
3: ensure the the document is utf-8 (you can add a header at the top)
<?php header('Content-type:text/html;charset=utf-8'); ?>
4: just to be on the safe side, add it in as a meta tag as well
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
HOWEVER
It's quite possible you've got some duff characters in the database where something like ISO-8859-1 has been juggled to UTF-8, badly. In this case you'll notice things like £ where what you actually want is £ (because UTF-8 characters contain more data than ISO-8859-1 characters, that extra data can become an additional character if you're not careful).
In which case your best bet is to clean the database (you could probably do something like UPDATE table SET field = REPLACE(field, '£', '£') for common "errors") and then convert the whole kaboodle to UTF-8 (as outlined above) to avoid the problem recurring.
To avoid having such characters,
Set the charset for your form. HTML forms have charset attribute and value. You can use UTF-8
Set Charset for the Document, via PHP or using META tags ( but this only works on the output )
set Charset for the db table
get a class/function to do ascii character conversion as part of your data filtering and escaping
I have looked around and can't seem to find a solution so here it is.
I have the following code:
$file = "adhddrugs.xml";
$xmlstr = simplexml_load_file($file);
echo $xmlstr->report_description;
This is the simple version, but even trying this any hyphens r apostrophes are turned into: ^a (euro sign) trademark sign.
Things I have tried are:
echo = (string)$xmlstr->report_description; /* did not work */
echo = addslashes($xmlstr->report_description); /* yes I know this doesnt work with hyphens, was mainly trying to see if I could escape the apostrophes */
echo = addslashes((string)$xmlstr->report_description); /* did not work */
also htmlspecial(again i know does not work with hyphens), htmlentities, and a few other tricks.
Now the situation is I am getting the XML files from a feed so I cannot change them, but they are pretty standard. The text with the hyphens etc are encapsulated in a cdata tag and encoding is UTF-8. If I check the source I am shown the hyphens and apostrophes in the source.
Now just to see if the encoding was off or mislabeled or something else weird, I tried to view the raw XML file and sure enough it is displayed correctly.
I am sure that in my rush to find the answer I have overlooked something simple and the fact that this is really the first time I have ever used SimpleXML I am missing a very simple solution. Just don't dock me for it I really did try and find the answer on my own.
Thanks again.
This is the simple version, but even
trying this any hyphens apostrophes
are turned into: ^a (euro sign)
trademark sign.
This is caused by incorrect charset guessing (and possibly recoding).
If a text contains a "curly apostrophe" = "Right single quotation mark" = U+2019 character, saving it in UTF-8 encoding results in bytes 0xE2 0x80 0x99. If the same file is then read again assuming its charset is windows-1252, the byte stream of the apostrophe character (0xE2 0x80 0x99) is interpreted as characters ’ (=small "a" with circumflex, euro sign, trademark sign). Again if this incorrectly interpreted text is saved as UTF-8 the original character results in byte stream 0xC3 0xA2 0xE2 0x82 0xAC 0xE2 0x84 0xA2
Summary: Your original data is UTF-8 and some part of your code that reads the data assumes it is windows-1252 (or ISO-8859-1, which is usually actually treated as windows-1252). A probable reason for this charset assumption is that default charset for HTTP is ISO-8859-1. 'When no explicit charset parameter is provided by the sender, media subtypes of the "text" type are defined to have a default charset value of "ISO-8859-1" when received via HTTP.' Source: RFC 2616, Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
PS. this is a very common problem. Just do a Google or Bing search with query doesn’t -doesn't and you'll see many pages with this same encoding error.
Do you know the document's character set?
You could do header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); before any content is printed, if you havent already.
Make sure you have set up SimpleXML to use UTF-8 too.
Be sure that all the entities are encoded using hex notation, not HTML entities.
Also maybe:
$string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, "utf-8");
will help.
This is a symptom of declaring an incorrect character set in the <head> section of your page (or not declaring and using default character set without accents and special characters).
This does the trick for latin languages.
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
For TOTAL NEWBIES, html pages for browsers have a basic layout, with a HEAD or HEADER which serves to tell the browser some basic stuff about the page, as well as preload some scripts that the page will use to achieve its functionality(ies).
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
Hello world
</body>
</html>
if the <head> section is omitted, html will use defaults (take some things for granted - like using the northamerican character set, which does NOT include many accented letters, whch show up as "weird characters".
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" />
Another utf-8 related problem I believe...
I am using php to update data in a mysql db then display that data elsewhere in the site. Previously I have run into utf-8 problems before where special characters are displayed as question marks when viewed in a browser but this one seems slightly different.
I have a number of records to enter that contain the è character. If I enter this directly in the db then it appears correctly on the page so I take this to mean that utf-8 content is being output correctly.
However when I try and update the values in the db through php, then the è character is replaced. What appears instead is & Atilde ; & uml ; (without the spaces) which appears in the browser as è
I have the tables in the database set to use UTF-8. I believe this is correct cos, as mentioned, if I update the db through phpMyAdmin, its all ok. Similarly I have set the character encoding for the page which seems to be correct. I am also running the sql statement "SET NAMES 'utf8';" before trying to update the db.
Anyone have any other ideas as to where the problem may lie?
Many thanks
Yup.
The character you have is LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE. As you can see, in UTF-8 that character is encoded into two bytes 0xC3 and 0xA8.
But in many default, western encodings (such as ISO-8859-1) which are single-byte only, this multi-byte character is decoded as two separate characters, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE and DIAERESIS. Notice how they are both encoded as C3 and A8 in ISO-8859-1?
Furthermore, it looks like PHP is processing these characters through htmlentities() which result in the à and ¨ respectively.
So, where exactly is the problem in your code? Well, htmlentities() could be doing it all by itself since its 3rd argument is a encoding name - which you may not have properly set to 'UTF-8'. But it could be some other string processing function as well. (Note: As a general rule, it's a bad idea to store HTML entities in the database - this step should be reserved for time of display)
There are a bunch of other ways to trip yourself up with UTF-8 in php - I suggest hitting up the cheatsheet and make sure you're in good shape.
Well it is your own code convert characters into entities.
To make it right:
Ban htmlentities function from your scripts forever.
Use htmlspecialchars, but not on insert, but whan displaying data.
Repair existing data in the database using html_entity_decode.
I suppose you're taking the results of some form submission and inserting the results in the database. If so, you must ensure that you instruct the browser to send UTF-8 data and you should validate the user input for a valid UTF-8 stream.
Change your form element to include accept-charset:
<form accept-charset="utf-8" method="post" ... >
<input type="text name="field" />
...
</form>
Validate the data with:
$valid = array_key_exists("field", $_POST) && !is_array($_POST['field']) &&
preg_match('//u', $_POST['field']) && ...; //check length with mb_strlen etc.
I think you miss Content-Type declaration on the html page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
If you don't have it, the browser will guess the encoding, and convert any characters outside of that encoding to entities when posting a form.
I'm using Kohana 3, which has full support for Unicode.
I have this as the first child of my <head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The Unicode character I am inserting into is é as in Café.
However, I am getting the triangle with a ? (as in could not decode character).
As far as I can tell in my own code, I am not doing any string manipulation on the text.
In fact, I have placed the accent straight into a view's PHP file and it is still not working.
I copied the character from this page: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00e9/index.htm
I've only just started examining PHP's Unicode limitations, so I could be doing something horribly wrong.
So, how do I display this character? Do I need to resort to the HTML entity?
Update
So this works
Caf<?php echo html_entity_decode('é', ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?>
Why does that work? If I copy the output accented e from that script and insert it into my document, it doesn't work.
View the http headers. You should see something like
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Browsers don't pay much attention to meta tags, if there was a real http header stating a different encoding.
update
Whatcha get from this?
echo bin2hex('é');
echo chr(0xc3) . chr(0xa9);
You should get c3a9é, otherwise I'd say file encoding issue.
I guess, you see �, the replacement character for invalid UTF-8 byte sequences. Your text is not UTF-8 encoded. Check your editor’s settings to control the encoding of the PHP file.
If you’re not sure about the encoding of your sources, you can enforce UTF-8 compatibilty as described here (German text): Force UTF-8.
You should never need entities except the basic ones.