PHP Internationalization and Localization Setting the Character Encoding of Outgoing Data

PHP Internationalization and Localization

Setting the Character Encoding of Outgoing Data

Problem

You want to make sure that browsers correctly handle the UTF-8–encoded text that your programs emit.

Solution

Set PHP’s default_encoding configuration directive to utf-8. This ensures that the Content-Type header PHP emits on HTML responses includes the charset=utf-8 piece, which tells web browsers to interpret the page contents as UTF-8 encoded.

Discussion

Setting default_encoding gives web browsers a heads-up that your page contents should be interpreted as UTF-8 encoded. However, you still have the responsibility of making sure that the page contents really are properly UTF-8 encoded by using string functions appropriately. Details how to do that.

If you can’t change the default_encoding configuration directive, send the proper Content-Type header yourself with the header() function.

Example  Setting character encoding

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