Configure php (or apache) to work with special language characters?

Jasp182

I'm building a site on a new install of CentOS with the default installations of apache and php. When I try to output text in spanish, my special characters (ie. ñ, ó, etc) are showing up as question marks. The guy in charge of the server recompiled php with mbstring module if that is what is required, but is there an additional setting i need in php.ini to enable/configure it? Am I even on the right track? I don't know if it's an apache thing or php, because the same thing happens whether I load the string from a text file in code before outputting it or if I just stick the string in a regular html file and browse to it.

How can I have the site work with spanish characters without changing the default language settings of the site (it's primarily an english language website with support for other languages).

Thanks!

NogDog

Do you specify UTF-8 as the character set in your HTML head? E.g.:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang='sp'>
<head>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; [b][COLOR="DarkRed"]charset=UTF-8[/COLOR][/b]'>

If so and you still have the problem, you could try using the utf8_encode() function:

printf("<p>%s</p>\n", utf8_encode($text));

Jasp182

NogDog wrote:
Do you specify UTF-8 as the character set in your HTML head? E.g.:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang='sp'>
<head>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; [b][COLOR="DarkRed"]charset=UTF-8[/COLOR][/b]'>
If so and you still have the problem, you could try using the utf8_encode() function:
printf("<p>%s</p>\n", utf8_encode($text));

Thanks so much!!!!! That definitely works for my "internationalized" strings, because I'm using a class method to get strings that are defined in other languages, so I just wrap the string in utf8_encode where i return it. However, I'd like to still have utf-8 be my default encoding for things like user input and other strings that I don't have specifically defined in my globalization system. I set the html meta as suggested above, that doesn't work. I set the default_charset in php.ini to utf-8, the AddDefaultCharset was already UTF-8 in httpd.conf, and I even tried setting the mbstring.default_encoding to utf-8 and uncommenting it (all of the mbstring stuff is commented out, I'm assuming this is standard default setting).

What else is there? I checked the phpinfo output for other system variables and saw that iconv had something to do with character encoding, so i tested echoing the string before and after setting all the iconv keys to UTF-8 (using iconv_set_encoding)...that did nothing either.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

MarkR

You don't need utf8_encode - it is naive and should not be used for anything.

If everything is in utf8 to start with, no conversions should be necessary - this is clearly the easiest way of doing things.

Where is $text coming from? Can you not simply fetch it in utf8 to start with? If you're using a database you need to be sure that that's working in utf8 throughout.

Mark