Force string into ISO-8859-1 charset

[stevewc]

Hi,

I'm developing some code that used a SOAP call to insert records into a remote database. However, the SOAP call is reliant on the string fields in the inserted record being of character-set ISO-8859-1. If it encounters another type of character, the SOAP call throws an 'illegal token' error.

The problem is that the these strings can sometimes be of various other charsets (they are received, mime-decoded email bodies).

I cannot get to the SOAP interface implementation to see if it can be changed, and these non ISO-8859-1 emails are infrequent enough so that the non ISO-8859-1 characters can be stripped out / replaced with any other character for now. Not ideal but at least the email gets into the database with incorrect characters rather than blow up.

However, I cannot find any reference to force a string into a particular characterset. I can't use htmlenitities() and htmlspecialchars() as I don't want valid ISO-8859-1 characters changed to '&quot' versions.

Any thoughts on the fastest way to achieve this transformation?

Thanks

[halojoy]

ConvertCharset.class v.1.0
This is a page where you can get full ConvertCharset.class
[url=http://mikolajj.*********.pl/]mikolajj.r e p u b l i k a.pl[/url] ( looks like it is a bad word 🙂 )
ConvertCharset_v1.0.zip

At hotscript http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/28436.html
Last Updated: Jul 29, 2004
.. so it is 2 years old .. but might work or could be modded

I am sure there are several other scripts, functions and classes
that converts between charsets.
There are many users of different languages in this big world.

[halojoy]

these
are the charsets ConvertCharset class supports
Not bad!

This is a list of charsets you can operate with, the basic rule is that a char have to be in both charsets,
otherwise you'll get an error.

- WINDOWS
- windows-1250 - Central Europe
- windows-1251 - Cyrillic
- windows-1252 - Latin I
- windows-1253 - Greek
- windows-1254 - Turkish
- windows-1255 - Hebrew
- windows-1256 - Arabic
- windows-1257 - Baltic
- windows-1258 - Viet Nam
- cp874 - Thai - this file is also for DOS

- DOS
- cp437 - Latin US
- cp737 - Greek
- cp775 - BaltRim
- cp850 - Latin1
- cp852 - Latin2
- cp855 - Cyrylic
- cp857 - Turkish
- cp860 - Portuguese
- cp861 - Iceland
- cp862 - Hebrew
- cp863 - Canada
- cp864 - Arabic
- cp865 - Nordic
- cp866 - Cyrylic Russian (this is the one, used in IE "Cyrillic (DOS)" )
- cp869 - Greek2

- MAC (Apple)
- x-mac-cyrillic
- x-mac-greek
- x-mac-icelandic
- x-mac-ce
- x-mac-roman

- ISO (Unix/Linux)
- iso-8859-1
- iso-8859-2
- iso-8859-3
- iso-8859-4
- iso-8859-5
- iso-8859-6
- iso-8859-7
- iso-8859-8
- iso-8859-9
- iso-8859-10
- iso-8859-11
- iso-8859-12
- iso-8859-13
- iso-8859-14
- iso-8859-15
- iso-8859-16

- MISCELLANEOUS
- gsm0338 (ETSI GSM 03.38)
- cp037
- cp424
- cp500
- cp856
- cp875
- cp1006
- cp1026
- koi8-r (Cyrillic)
- koi8-u (Cyrillic Ukrainian)
- nextstep
- us-ascii
* - us-ascii-quotes

[MarkR]

Or you could just use either the iconv() or mbstring functions to do something similar.

Unfortunately, an 8bit character set like ISO-8859-1 cannot represent many unicode characters, so any outside that set will be lost. If that's what you want, fine.

iconv and mbstring both have mechanisms (I think) whereby characters can be substituted if impossible conversions are encountered.

Mark