: Encoding fails whatever I try I am trying to set my site's encoding to UTF-8 but I fail. Environment: Ubuntu Desktop 13.04, Apache 2.2, PHP+FPM. Added a .htacces: AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 Meta:

@Heady270

From: allseeing-i.com/How-to-setup-your-PHP-site-to-use-UTF8

Unicode is not quite a first class citizen in PHP, so you'll have to do some tweaking to get it to grok UTF-8.

Firstly, you need to ensure that you have MBString enabled in your copy of PHP. If you're on Linux and using a packaged PHP, it may be installed by default. If not, it's probably just a case of adding it with:

$ yum install php-mbstring

...

Assuming you have multi-byte support built-in, now you need to make sure PHP knows that you want to handle text as UTF-8 internally. Add the following to an include that gets parsed before anything else, and you should be good to go:

//setup php for working with Unicode data
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
mb_http_input('UTF-8');
mb_language('uni');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
ob_start('mb_output_handler');


If you're doing anything with strings other than reading them from a database and outputing them, you'll probably want to read about PHP's multi-byte functions. Basically, many string functions have multi-byte capable alternatives, with the prefix 'mb_'. So, substr() becomes mb_substr()

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