base64_decode POST args为UTF8

Question

$bob = _POST["bob"];
$decodeBob = base64_decode($bob);
echo $decodeBob;

I am trying to parse POST data in php. The process works fine for english string but for a japanese character they do not print out correctly. It appears to be printing each of the ascii values rather than combining them to a single multibyte character.

I feel like I need to set the formating on either my php file or on the request I am sending up. I tried adding the header tag..

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

to my php page but with no success. Any idea what might be wrong here?

Edit: My phpinfo tells me a bit more..

mbstring does have extended japanese kanji support enabled (sounds like that is just for regex though). No mention of an 'encoding' in this section.

HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING    gzip,deflate,sdch

Answer 1

This is a great article that I have shared a countless number of times that will probably shed some light on your problem: http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets and how you can prevent it from happening in the future.