UTF-8 all the way through

Question

I'm setting up a new server, and want to support UTF-8 fully in my web application. I have tried in the past on existing servers and always seem to end up having to fall back to ISO-8859-1.

Where exactly do I need to set the encoding/charsets? I'm aware that I need to configure Apache, MySQL and PHP to do this - is there some standard checklist I can follow, or perhaps troubleshoot where the mismatches occur?

This is for a new Linux server, running MySQL 5, PHP 5 and Apache 2.

Answer 1

In addition to setting default_charset in php.ini, you can send the correct charset using header() from within your code, before any output:

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

Working with Unicode in PHP is easy as long as you realize that most of the string functions don't work with Unicode, and some might mangle strings completely. PHP considers "characters" to be 1 byte long. Sometimes this is okay (for example, explode() only looks for a byte sequence and uses it as a separator -- so it doesn't matter what actual characters you look for). But other times, when the function is actually designed to work on characters, PHP has no idea that your text has multi-byte characters that are found with Unicode.

A good library to check into is phputf8. This rewrites all of the "bad" functions so you can safely work on UTF8 strings. There are extensions like the mbstring extension that try to do this for you, too, but I prefer using the library because it's more portable (but I write mass-market products, so that's important for me). But phputf8 can use mbstring behind the scenes, anyway, to increase performance.