Displaying a string containing char £/#163;

edwardp

I am trying to create a forum style board for my company's intranet and i am having trouble with displaying certain symbols on the screen.

for some reason php with xajax has problems displaying certain characters. If i use them directly I have to, therefore, use the html codes. I am having particular problems with the £ (#163; in html). I am getting the problem when retrieving data from my database. since i cannot use the £ (xajax throws an error), ive been using the code when inserting into the dbase. However when these data is retrieved from the database, php fails to render the code to a '£' on screen, all i keep getting is #163; instead. Is there a funtion i can parse the string through to make sure this (and other chars) are correctly displayed.

Hope this makes sense

(for those who arent sure about xajax/ajax, it is an extension to javascript using xml calls to a php script so that portions of a display can be updated without having to reload all of the page)

liquorvicar

It sounds like it might be a character set issue. According to http://www.asciitable.com/ 163 is actually the code for an accented letter u and 156 is a pound sign. Are you using an unusual character set? You might want to look into PHP's MBstring extension and use that to normalise the character set of all data you put into your database.

MarkR

You clearly have an encoding inconsistency problem. You should always be mindful of the encoding that you're using:
- For your HTML
- For (e.g. POST) requests to your site
- As a database client character set (in the case of a database e.g. MySQL)
- In the database itself
- In emails

And anywhere else it is relevant.

I strongly recommend that you use the same encoding as much as possible, it will save a lot of trouble.

Of course AJAX applications need data from the client to the server to be encoded correctly- this is outside of the scope of PHP (being in Javascript). I normally use encodeURIComponent, which you will see from the documentation, URI-encodes a javascript string in utf8.

If you're using a pre-built framework on the client side, then you need to refer to its documentation to ensure that you're using it correctly with non-ascii characters.

All decent AJAX frameworks need to address encoding issues correctly, therefore if there is no documentation explicitly stating how it uses encodings, it's not been well constructed (or at least, not well documented), and shouldn't be used in a production system.

Getting encodings right is NOT difficult, it's just that so many people get it wrong or ignore it and hope it will go away.

Mark

edwardp

I first checked the charset of MySQL using :

$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "root", "sd91ds", "partscatalogue_order");
echo "MySQL Charset : ".$mysqli->character_set_name();

the output was latin1

i then generated an ascii table through php

for($x=0;$x<200;$x++){
	echo $x." - &#".$x.";<br>";
}

#163; - £
#156; - œ

when i look in my php.ini file, i have these two lines

default_mimetype = "text/html"
;default_charset =

All my php settings (apart from modules and error reporting) are as a standard installation how can i find out what charset im using in php??? and where is it defined?? is it taking the charset from my system???

I should note that i'm using php and mysql in a windows 2003 environment.

xajax has a file xajax.inc.php and the first few lines are:

if (!defined ('XAJAX_DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING'))
{
	define ('XAJAX_DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING', 'utf-8' );
}

I have decided to change this to

if (!defined ('XAJAX_DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING'))
{
	define ('XAJAX_DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING', 'ISO-8859-1' );
}

to tell xajax to use latin1 charset and therefore fit in with mysql. I am however still in the dark over what charset im using in php? and from liquorvicar's post above i am confused over the multibyte string functions.

If i access the Mysql console and extract the data that has issues, it is an 'accented u' and not a £

edwardp

UPDATE----------

making the change to the xajax default type has sorted my situation out

Thanks for the advice

liquorvicar

It may have sorted out your issue this time but if you are not being consistent across the board you will hit problems later as MarkR pointed out. It's well worth the time spent now to get it right.