Character converting

[Yamakazi]

I have a problem with none English characters in PHP. For instance: ë à ê
All of these characters show up as ë when interpretted with PHP. Is there a setting or something wich i can set so these characters will turn out ok. If possible not by passing all my output to a function or something. 'cause At this moment i have to mcuh code to do something like that. Anyone else had this problem. Because every German, French, Dutch, ... programmer would have had this problem at sometime.

TIA

EDIT: I noticed the forum interprets my ë à ê as it should do. how do you guys do that?

[stevesweetland]

you might try doing a url encode or the like?

please note if you are storing a url encoded string, you will need to strip slashes from the string (it adds slashes to make single quotes safe).

urlencode()
stripcslashes()

should put you on the right track, unless im really not getting your point....

[Yamakazi]

I don't think you quiet get what i mean.

if i do this:

$Var = 'é';
echo "This is a é and this is a $Var";

it prints out

This is a é and this is a é

How come it does this? Is this a setting in PHP? Can i change this?

[stevesweetland]

hmm dont know mate, mine doesnt do that...

[Yamakazi]

Hey me again with some feedback.

I did some more testing and this is my conclusion:

é is shown as é when it's retrieved from a DB.

é is shown as é when taken from a variable wich was filled with in PHP
é is shown as é when just echo'd
& eacute; is shown as é in any case

So to conclude é is messed up when it's used directly in PHP. Is this a bug. Cause this is a strange behaviour.

PS: You can change the é with ë à ê ...

[MarkR]

My questions would be:

1. What encoding is your PHP file written in?
2. What encoding is your output in?

If you do not know the answer to these questions, you need to find out.

If it's not the same, there's your problem. Seems likely to me like your PHP file is written in UTF-8 and your output is in ISO-8859-1.

If either of them is a multibyte or variable encoding like UTF-8 or one of the eastern multibyte character sets, you are in trouble.

PHP does not support multibyte character sets very well. Personally I would never use PHP for a site which required a multibyte character set.

Fortunately because I live in an English-speaking country and the nearest biggest European countries to me also use single-byte character sets, this is not a problem for me.

Mark