Character encoding in PHP

I never had this problem before, it was usually my database or the html page. But now i think its my php. I import text from a csv or from a text area and in both ways it goes wrong.

for example é changes to é. I used htmlentities to fix this but it didn't work. The htmlentities function didn't return é in html but é in html entities, so it already loses the real characters before htmlentities comes in to place... So does that mean my php file has th开发者_如何学编程e wrong encoding or something?

I hope someone can help me out..

Thanks! Chris

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A file is usually ISO-8859-1 (Latin) or UTF-8 ... ISO-8859-1 is 1 byte per char, UTF-8 is 1-4 bytes per char. So if you get 2 chars when you expect one, then you are reading UTF-8 and showing it as ISO-8859-1 ... if you get strange chars, then you are reading ISO-8859-1 and showing it as UTF-8.

If you provide more details, it would be easier to pinpoint, but in short, you have inconsistent charsets and need to convert one or the other so they're all the same. But from what it seems, you're using ISO-8859-1 in your project, but you are reading some UTF-8 from somewhere... use utf8_decode($text) if that data should be indeed be stored as UTF-8, or find the data and convert it manually.

EDIT: If you are using AJAX somewhere, then you will ALWAYS get UTF-8 from it, and you'll have to decode it yourself with utf8_decode() if you want to keep using ISO-8859-1.

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Try opening your php file and change the encoding to UTF-8

if that doesn't help, add this to your php:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Or this to your html:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

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Take a look at PHP's iconv().