STR_replace across different character sets

[vmadurai]

Greetings!

I am very new to character sets but somewhat familiar with PHP. We have a lot of content that is with windows True Type fonts and show up on browsers on windows if the font is installed on the users' computers

For each of the characters in the language (the language is an Indian language called Tamil), i know the corresponding characters in unicode UTF8

However, when i do str_replace by replacing the truetype font characters with the unicode characters, i simply get junk.

I guess i am missing something very simple: i need to encode/decode in some form first.... any ideas will be very very welcome.

Sample code:

$the_content = str_replace('ªþ£', 'க்ஷொ', $the_content);
$the_content = str_replace('ªþ÷', 'க்ஷௌ', $the_content);

...and so on for each unique character

Thanks and regards

Vmadurai

[johanafm]

Trute type fonts are fonts, not character encodings. UTF-8 is a character encoding set, not a font.

A font is needed to display the glyphs (characters) on screen, but it has nothing to do with the data stored. The characters need a specific character encoding to be stored, so that each character is mapped to a specific number (1-3 bytes in UTF-8).

As long as you are properly using character sets in PHP when performing the str replacement things should work ok as far as this is concerned.

Wether or not you have replaced anything, a font containing the proper glyphs is needed on the end users computer to display the text on screen.

Personally I'd recommend sticking to UTF-8 all the way. If you have a text which is not in UTF-8, start by converting it to utf-8 ([man]utf8_encode[/man] - only for converting iso-8859-1, [man]iconv[/man]). iconv is enabled by default, but your PHP installation might have it disabled if it was compiled with --without-iconv.

# first convert the text
$str = iconv('your charset', 'utf-8', $str);

# use an editor which let's you save documents as utf-8.
# That way you can type "special" characters directly into your document
# and save it that way
$str = str_replace('search', 'replace', $str);