Encoding problem in PHP while making a webservice call

Question

I have the nth problem encoding related with PHP!

so the story is:

• i read a url from a file (ISO-8859). I cant change the encoding of this file for various reason I wont discuss here.

• I use that url to make a call to a rest webservice.

• the url happens to contain the symbol "è" which is conveted to � when it is loaded by the PHP engine.

• as a result the webservice returns and unexpected result because what it gets is actually the word "perch�" instead of "perchè".

I tried to force php to work with ISO-8859 by doing:

ini_set('default_charset', "ISO-8859");

The problem is that it still doesn't work and the webservice doesn't answer properly. I am sure that the webservice works as I tried to copy paste the url by hand in a browser and I received the expected data.

Answer 1

You can convert data from one character set into another using iconv().

Your REST web service is most likely expecting UTF-8 data, so you would have to do something like this:

$data = iconv("iso-8859-1", "utf-8", $data);

before sending the request.