UTF-8 problem

vkost

Hi all,

I have a strange problem regarding UTF-8 characters on a PHP page I'm making. The page contains cyrillic letters in <title> tag, but it's not coded in php at all, it's inserted as plain html after some php code for database data fetch. When I put the page on my server, it outputs as it should, the title is shown in cyrillic etc, but when I try the same thing on the provider's server, it outputs question marks instead of letters. Furthermore, the encoding is deduced properly by the browser, UTF-8 is selected. When I look at page source, I see plain question marks instead of my cyrillic text, as if PHP parser did not output them correctly, or did not read them correctly from source file.

Then I removed the PHP code and renamed the page to .html extension, and tried it on the same server, and letters came up as they should. So this kinda convinced me I have a problem with the parser, but I never ran into this before, and I don't know where to look to fix it.

If anybody wants to take a look, the page is in the attachment.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Regards,
Victor

etully

There are two settings in the PHP ini file that need to be set and then restart the server. Nice work changing the filename to HTML - this removed Apache from the list of possible suspects (as it often needs a few settings changed as well).

Unfortunately, I don't have my notes with me so I can't remember the PHP ini settings off the top of my head but look for things like "charset" and "encoding" in your PHP ini file. You should not have it set to ISO-####. That's the old style.

Sorry, I wish I could be more specific. Hopefully this answer gets you close and Google can carry it the rest of the way.

vkost

@
Thank you so much for your effort, but I managed to solve my problem by pure chance. I'm posting the "solution" here so someone else may skip the head-banging part 🙂

It turns out that one of my editors detected unicode letters and added a three-byte unicode header (EF BB BF) in front of my code. This was not visible from any of the editors, and Apache passed it as it is, so browsers ignored it and everything worked fine. PHP, however, noticed the three bytes 😉 , read the file as something else, and the bug occured. Creating a new file and copying the code from the original one fixed the problem. I could also remove the header from the original file, I believe that the result would be the same, but I had no byte editor at hand.

It is interesting that PHP on my server seemed to ignore the three bytes, but I cannot be completely sure of this, since I experimented with several versions of the file. It could be that I accidently uploaded the one without unicode header to my server, so my PHP worked fine.

Thanks again
Victor