PHP, Unicode and UTF-8 without hassles

~~Edit~~

PHP, Unicode and UTF-8 without hassles

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Enable mbstring in PHP

PHP doesn’t natively support unicode but it’s compatible, you can check if multibytes functions are available.

php -m | grep mbstring

You can enable it with sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring or at compile time by adding this flag --enable-mbstring. More info here. If you can’t install mbstring via those ways, you can use the polyfill provided by symfony.

composer require symfony/polyfill-mbstring

PHP multibyte functions are documented here mb_*

UTF-8 and PHP

php -r "echo ini_get('default_charset');"

If you use PHP EXIF extension you can also check php -r "echo ini_get('exif.encode_unicode');"

Make you application UTF-8 ready !

HTML

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

HTTP

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

PHP PDO

$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
$dbh->exec("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");

$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass, array(
    PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8")
);

Enforce UTF-8

composer require patchwork/utf8

\Patchwork\Utf8\Bootup::initAll();
\Patchwork\Utf8\Bootup::filterRequestUri();
\Patchwork\Utf8\Bootup::filterRequestInputs();
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');

Never use utf8_decode() and utf8_encode() in your application.

They are misspelled, they only encode and decode between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 think about iso88591_to_utf8 for utf8_decode and utf8_to_iso88591 for utf8_encode .

If you want convert to another charset (it’s called transliteration) you can transliterate with iconv

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', 'text');

$string = '€';
echo iconv(mb_detect_encoding($string), 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);