CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpunicodeencodingcharacter-encoding
JDelage
JDelage

Reputation: 13692

Setting the PHP default encoding to UTF-8

In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the character encoding of outgoing data to UTF-8, it is necessary to edit the default_encoding configuration to utf-8.

However, I cannot find this configuration in file php.ini. Should I simply add a line that would say default_encoding = "utf-8"?

I do have a ;default_charset = "iso-8859-1". As you can see (;), right now it is not activated. Should I remove the semicolon and set it to "utf-8"? Does that take care of the default encoding?

I also found other encoding directives that I don't know what to do about:

[iconv]
;iconv.input_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.internal_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.output_encoding = ISO-8859-1
...
; http://php.net/exif.encode-unicode
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
...
;mssql.charset = "ISO-8859-1"
...
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15

Is there any reason why I shouldn't simply replace them all with utf-8?

Upvotes: 36

Views: 210168

Answers (5)

gioele
gioele

Reputation: 10225

Modify the line

;default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

to read

default_charset = "utf-8"

About the other options, do not touch them. Avoid default settings, always explicitly set the encoding of in everything you do

  • database connections,
  • reading and writing files,
  • converting with iconv.

Also, beware of the encoding in which your PHP files are saved, make sure that they are in UTF-8, especially if they contain strings to be displayed or compared.

Upvotes: 10

ontananza
ontananza

Reputation: 392

At the htaccess level (.htaccess file), the PHP directive should be php_value default_charset UTF-8.

Upvotes: 3

user7232321
user7232321

Reputation: 1

To resolve it, I changed "UTF-8" to "UTF-8" (without the dash), solving the problem instead.

It was on CentOS.

Upvotes: -2

Miguel Q
Miguel Q

Reputation: 3628

I had a problem on my MySQL query that it would not recognize some Latin accentuation, so the query would fail. I thought it could be the PHP file and so on, till I found out that using PDO to call the MySQL function I had to add the character set. The weird thing is that on the previous server I used it worked fine!

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=retirodo_main;charset=utf8';
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ^^^^^^^^^^^^

Upvotes: 4

Ben D
Ben D

Reputation: 14499

You should set your default_charset to UTF-8:

default_charset = "utf-8"

(PHP Cookbook may have a typo in it if they ask you to change the default_encoding — I've never heard of it.)

You'll also want to make sure that your web server is set to output UTF-8 if you're going to outputting UTF-8 encoded characters. In Apache, this can be set by in the httpd.conf file:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

As for modifying the iconv, exif, and mssql encoding settings, you probably don't need to set these (your settings have these commented out anyhow), but it's a good idea to change them all to UTF-8 anyhow.

Upvotes: 53

Related Questions