php - foreign characters not showing correctly

Question

I am trying to do so foreign characters is showing correctly at my website.

When I try to write: "Português" it will output this:

Portugu&Atilde;&ordf;s

The code I use is:

$name = htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($f['forum_name']));

I also tried this:

$name = html_entity_decode(stripslashes(stripslashes($f['forum_desc'])));

But that gave me:

PortuguÃªs

What am I doing wrong?

Edit: $f is coming from this:

$sf=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM forum_cats WHERE forum_type='0' AND forum_type_id='".$h['forum_id']."'");

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through — Mike B, Oct 18 '13 at 16:19
What made you think that `stripslashes()` would be of any help at all? It's entirely unrelated to the problem. — Spudley, Oct 18 '13 at 16:22
I've updated my question with where $f is coming from. About stripslashes - sometimes my text generated \\\\ to it. That's why I added it. — oliverbj, Oct 18 '13 at 16:24
Try with adding the encoding to htmlspecialchars function htmlspecialchars( $string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8' ) — Danijel, Oct 18 '13 at 17:00

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 18 '13 at 16:25

First, make sure your PHP program file is saved with UTF-8 encoding. (a decent editor should allow you to set the encoding)
Second, make sure that your HTML code specifies UTF-8 encoding: Make sure you have the following meta tag in your HTML head:
```
<meta charset="UTF-8">
```
Thirdly, throw away all that entity decoding and especially throw away the stripslashes().

You may also need to do further work to make sure that everything in your system is using UTF-8 encoding (eg the database, other input files).

Shankar Damodaran · Answer 2 · 2013-10-18T16:42:18.657

0

Make use of utf-8 decode

<?php
echo utf8_decode("Português");//Português

EDIT : (From your latest question update) Add this on top of your PHP code.

<?php
ini_set('default_charset','utf-8');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

edited Oct 18 '13 at 16:42

answered Oct 18 '13 at 16:17

Shankar Damodaran

Doing like this: $name = utf8_decode($f['forum_name']); Doesn't work. Output this: PortuguÃªs – oliverbj Oct 18 '13 at 16:18
You need to add this if you are using mysqli, Just specify the charset as utf-8 like this. `$dbh = new PDO('mysql:charset=utf8');` – Shankar Damodaran Oct 18 '13 at 16:36

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 08 '14 at 09:16

0

Try this:

<?php echo iconv(mb_detect_encoding($f['forum_name'], "UTF-8,ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8", $f['forum_name']); ?>

Use mb_detect_encoding() to detect the charset type of your strings and iconv() to convert string to requested character encoding.

You can refer mb_detect_encoding and iconv on official documentation site.

edited May 08 '14 at 09:16

Bhavik Shah

answered Oct 18 '13 at 16:23

CIRCLE

Doesn't change anything. – oliverbj Oct 18 '13 at 16:24
are you setting your database connection to utf-8? – CIRCLE Oct 18 '13 at 16:26
Like this: `$connection = mysqli_connect(DB_SERVER,DB_USER,DB_PASS);` `mysqli_set_charset($connection, 'utf8');` – CIRCLE Oct 18 '13 at 16:27

3 Answers3