CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpcharacterecho
Daku Daku
Daku Daku

Reputation: 115

Special characters from xml file don't display correctly using php

This may be a stupid question but its not a matter of what I can find, its a matter that I dont know what to search for. There are some special characters that don't show correctly in php. I'm taking some information from an xml file, and echo-ing them.

ie:

should be -> Nürnberg

echoes as -> Nürnberg

any tips on what to look for, or how to resolve this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3108

Answers (6)

Danack
Danack

Reputation: 25701

"I'm taking some information from an xml file, and echo-ing them."

Windows command line doesn't support utf8 properly as it doesn't use an UTF8 font.

Just put the file into somewhere that's reachable through a web server and test it by calling the file through the web server. Alternatively pipe the output of the script into a text file:

php test.php > output.txt

And either open output.txt is a UTF8 capable editor or use a utf8 capable 'Tail' program.

Test.php

<?php
    echo "Nürnberg";
?>

Running from command prompt:

php test.php

Nürnberg

Calling through a web server http://localhost/test.php

Nürnberg

Upvotes: 0

deceze
deceze

Reputation: 522016

You simply have an encoding mismatch. Get up to speed with these articles:

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text
Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App

Upvotes: 1

Stan James
Stan James

Reputation: 2555

There is a mismatch between the character encoding of your XML and what you are outputting from PHP. Most likely, one is UTF-8 and one is ISO-8859.

On the PHP side, you can set this with a header directive

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1');
header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
?>

and/or in the outputted HTML

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

On the XML side, most quality text editors allow you to specify the character encoding as you save the file. (E.g. WordWrangler on Mac)

If the XML file is indeed in ISO-8859, you could use utf8_encode() to convert it to UTF-8 as you read it in.

An in-depth discussion of PHP and character encoding.

Upvotes: 0

Theodore R. Smith
Theodore R. Smith

Reputation: 23231

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"  />

Upvotes: 1

Prasad Rajapaksha
Prasad Rajapaksha

Reputation: 6190

Can you try with following meta tag in your HTML head.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"  />

Upvotes: 0

Christopher Johnson
Christopher Johnson

Reputation: 2629

try a different character set on the page you're echoing from

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_charactersets.asp

Upvotes: 0

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