CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpunicode
dynamic
dynamic

Reputation: 48141

Do I need to set ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' );?

My framework for each pages does the follow:

ini_set('mbstring.internal_encoding','UTF-8');
ini_set('mbstring.func_overload',7);
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Do I need to do a ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' ); too?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 69903

Answers (5)

Jake
Jake

Reputation: 1077

Ideally you should set UTF-8 as the default charset at the server configuration level. If your hosting provider is setting another, then you would need to override it with an .ini setting, or choose another hosting provider. Most set UTF-8 as the default now.

In 2023, you want to be using a universal character set that is capable of all languages, emojis, and whatnot. The only other alternatives for that are UTF-16 and UTF-32, which are more wasteful bytewise for latin or cyrillic text.

The strings you handle in your PHP app may be encoded differently. The .ini setting won't affect that. You can use mb_detect_encoding and mb_convert_encoding if you may recieve text whose encoding is unknown.

Upvotes: 0

gmgj
gmgj

Reputation: 81

Please see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=29983 looks to me like some distros still have the problem

test case

echo "ini_get('default_charset') ". ini_get('default_charset')."<br>";

if (!ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8')) {
echo "could not set default_charset to utf-8<br>";
}

Upvotes: 7

itpastorn
itpastorn

Reputation: 2995

When it comes to the http-header, you're OK as the other answers explain.

But: There are some functions that are default charset aware

From the description of FILTER_SANITIZE_FULL_SPECIAL_CHARS:

Like htmlspecialchars, this filter is aware of the default_charset and if a sequence of bytes is detected that makes up an invalid character in the current character set then the entire string is rejected resulting in a 0-length string.

Upvotes: 6

zambesianus
zambesianus

Reputation: 1249

default_charset ini setting should work for you. PHP always outputs a character encoding by default in the Content-type: header using this setting

Upvotes: 3

Bart Vangeneugden
Bart Vangeneugden

Reputation: 3446

No, you don't have to.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

sets this for every page already

Upvotes: 7

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