"Aller à" OR "Aller &agrave;" French characters display in 3rd party site

blackhorse

"Aller à" OR "Aller à"

I have a site with 4 languages, English, German, French, and Dutch. Texts are given by the client.

For German or French, there will characters like this "Aller à". I have no problems to display and save this "à" at my site and in my MySQL database. But when I pass this text to a 3rd party site, they cannot display "à".

I got the French text from the client, for example, somehow some times I cut and paste his text and I got "Aller à", sometimes I got "Aller à" The browser display will be the same.

My questions are

1) What he did differently when he wrote the French, so I got "Aller à" sometimes, and got "Aller à" some other times?

2) When I pass the value "Aller à" to third party site, sometimes "à" cannot be displayed. If I pass "Aller à" to 3rd party site, will it solve the problem?

3) If "Aller à" is platform independent, what my client should do when he write in French so he can always give me "Aller à" not "Aller à".

4) Is there a tool, windows tool, dreamweaver can let me transfer "Aller à" to "Aller à" ?

5) Or better, is there a php function so I can transfer all these characters from German, French and Dutch, like "Aller à" to "Aller à"? So any these kind values I will pass to 3rd party site, I will transfer them first. Such as transfer "Aller à" to "Aller à" and then pass them to 3rd party site or its database.

Thanks!

MarkR

You haven't said how you're transferring this to the third party web site - presumably by transferring the HTML files manually.

Maybe the third party web site is using a different encoding to the one you are and your data are in.

You must always be aware of what encoding you're using. Don't leave it to chance.

Personally I think using HTML entities is a terrible way of doing it and they should be avoided if you can sort the encoding issues out.

Mark

herve

If you have a multi-language site, Unicode is also a good way to do it.

Currently I'm working on a site which will be available in :
French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian and ... Latin 🙂 )

I'm really happy that PHP 5.1 & MySQL 4.x deal fluently with Unicode 🙂 !

But of course, the inter-operability with third parties (not dealing with Unicode) might be a problem in your case ...

blackhorse

They have no problems to be displayed in my site and saved in my database. German, French, English and Dutch, the encoding is fine. If I have Russian, Chinese then Unicode may be a must.

The value is saved in xml string, and then passed to 3rd party site through socket connection (curl used).

I am thinking if all the Non English characters such as "à" transferred to "à" and then pass them to the 3rd party site, will that solve all the problems?

What is php function to do this job? Thanks!

herve

It's hard to tell you if it will solve the problem, since we don't know why they can't
display 'éèà...'

May be the channel used (the socket) has some problem with 8 bits encoding ?
How do they store data ? How do they display data ?
Are they using iso-8859-1 encoding or 7 bits ASCII for instance ?

Using "à" instead of "à" will surely solve some problems, but since we don't
know the exact reason ...

To convert, use the htmlentities() function (cf http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php )

blackhorse

I asked the 3rd party, they asked me to send them the value in HTML equivalent. So I think that will solve the display problem.

Also these contents will not just be used in the online display, but it will also be used in the email (html style) sent out from that 3rd party site. I am going to see if the e-mail will have the problem.

blackhorse

Found out! They use unicode encoding. They have to deal with all kind European lanuages. They asked me to send the German or French to them in html equivalents.

But the problem is that I am sending them a rich text editor value, meaning,

$value_i_sent="

<table>
...
<tr>
<td>
Aller à means Go!
</td>
</tr>
...
</table>

I want to apply htmlentities() to $value_i_sent, but only change the French and German characters (if necessary Dutch, but I think Dutch has the same characters as English), such as change "à" to "à". But I want to keep the table tags and all other html tags unchanged. Is there a way I can do that? That will be great. Because if I have to do it the following way, I have a lot of htmlentities to add.

Or I have to apply htmlentities() to German and French texts before I use it to create the rich text value such as
...
$german_text_100=htmlentities($german_text_100);
$german_text_101=htmlentities($german_text_101);
...

$value_i_sent="

<table>
...
<tr>
<td>
$german_text_100
</td>
</tr>
...
</table>

herve

If they're using Unicode, why don't they request you to send data in Unicode 😕 ?

Sound crazy to me, but anyway ...

You just need to replace '<' and '>' after using htmlentities()

Something like this :

<?php

function encode($my_string)
{
    $html = htmlentities($my_string);
    $tmp = str_replace ("&lt;","<",$html);
    $final = str_replace ("&gt;",">",$tmp);

return($final);
}

$value_i_sent="

<table>
...
<tr>
<td>
Aller à means Go!
</td>
</tr>
...
</table>

";


print encode($value_i_sent);

?>

blackhorse

Maybe not all the people can send them unicode.

Plus, if I send them the unicode, they will email whatever I send to them to an email address I gave in advance. The email recipient may not be able to read unicode in his e-mail.

So considering this, html equivalents is a right answer?

blackhorse

//handle the unicode issue
//$xml=html_entity_decode($xml);
$xml=htmlentities($xml);
$xml = str_replace ("<","<",$xml);
$xml = str_replace (">",">",$xml);
$xml = str_replace ("&", "&", $xml);

Thanks! Plus I also to replace $xml = str_replace ("&", "&", $xml);

It works fine!

Any other characters replace I need to do? If anyone else has the same issue before can share their experience?

herve

blackhorse wrote:
Plus, if I send them the unicode, they will email whatever I send to them to an email address I gave in advance. The email recipient may not be able to read unicode in his e-mail.

Yes, that's true.

So considering this, html equivalents is a right answer?

Well, it seems so 🙂

Any other characters replace I need to do?

Check here : http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/entities.html
if you found something applicable to you.