Special characters problem (flat file cms)

r0b

I've written a very small flat file CMS which has problems with special characters. (like Chinese, German, Japanase). (The content is saved to .txt files).

I found something that only fixes German letters (ü, ö) and a few other special characters with:

$content = mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8');

What I've tried so far to fix the problem is - putting all the files into coding type UTF-8 and 5 other solutions that didn't work so far:

htmlentities($content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') ;
html_entity_decode($content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') ;
htmlspecialchars($content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') ;
fwrite($file, utf8_encode($content));
$content = htmlspecialchars($content, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

It's weird that on some servers, this CMS works perfectly without any extra code and accepts Chinese, Japanase, Hebrew, Arabic and any kind of foreign language with special characters.

Information that could help:
The error when trying to enter a special character: false.

If I manually write a special character into the text file, it displays it properly, but when trying to edit it, it just displays false again.

I'm attaching the latest version of the CMS. If you want to test it online just go to the official demo page (password is admin).

dagon

any particular reason why you are going 'backwards' and creating a flat file cms? rather than using a db?

r0b

dagon;10982107 wrote:
any particular reason why you are going 'backwards' and creating a flat file cms? rather than using a db?

It's not that I'm trying to go backwards, it just there are a lot of regular MYSQL db and I'm trying to do something fresh, new and small - without a DB.

Any idea on how to solve this?

NogDog

I'm not sure why there is any reason to "fix" anything, assuming it's all UTF-8 characters. You may, however, want to explicitly set a content-type header that specifies, that characters set -- which may be why some servers work and others don't, depending on which they set by default. (And you can set it in the meta tags, too, just to cover all bases.)

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html;charset="utf-8"'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>An XHTML 1.0 Strict standard template</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<div>
<?php echo htmlentities(some_text_from_somewhere(), ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'); ?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Weedpacket

r0b wrote:
It's not that I'm trying to go backwards, it just there are a lot of regular MYSQL db and I'm trying to do something fresh, new and small - without a DB.

Not necessarily that new; see [man]SQLite[/man].

bradgrafelman

r0b;10982136 wrote:
there are a lot of regular MYSQL db

Indeed there are... it's so popular that it's almost as if it does a good job at it. 😉