PHP Arabic

John_Marbon

Hi,
I am using a PHP script to search an RTF template and replace certain words by other given words. The problem is when I want to replace a word with an Arabic word, it writes on the RTF template unrecognised symbols such as ËÊÇÊÇ. Can you help on that please?

Thanks in advance

dagon

match the php file encoding with the rtf files's encoding

John_Marbon

Hi, thanks for replying.

But how shall I do what you suggested?

NogDog

You may need to use the Multibyte string functions, such as [man]mb_eregi_replace/man, in order to deal effectively with multi-byte character sets.

John_Marbon

But to replace what? I am not quite sure how to use these function? The php code displays the arabic words well when I echo to the browser but it writes them as symbols on the rtf file.

NogDog

It appears that RTF is not very unicode-friendly. You may have to look for a PHP function that will convert unicode characters to their RTF escape sequences. (There may even be something in the built-in functions, but I'm not aware of it.)

John_Marbon

I think the problem is with the fwrite function which doesn't handle unicode, however, I have tried to use mb_convert_encoding and utf8_encode and both didn't work 😕

bradgrafelman

John Marbon wrote:
I think the problem is with the fwrite function which doesn't handle unicode

[man]fwrite/man writes whatever binary data you send it, so it doesn't care what character encoding you're using.

John_Marbon

Ok, it is not fwrite(), it is str_replace() that is causing the problem. Anyone knows how to use it to replace whatever text to Arabic?

John_Marbon

And I've tried to open the rtf file in utf-8 like that fopen(utf8_encode(file.rtf), "w") and I have saved the php file in utf-8 but it is still not working!!

John_Marbon

The problem is with finding and replacing Arabic words. RTF files store Arabic lettrers as special combinations of symbols so when you search the RTF for a given Arabic word you won't find it. Any suggestions please?