Question

Basically I have localized a website by using gettext(), and used the UTF-8 character encoding format.

1. Can anybody suggest me that there will be issue in validation of form (like length of the field) in UTF-8 ?

2. can UTF-8 is sufficient to manage HTML special characters or entity?

3. Can the translated string in UTF-8 format be stored in database?

Please suggest me if any issue occurs.
Thanks…..

Answer 1

1. If you want to accept data in UTF-8 and do validation on it that requires looking at individual characters, you’ll need to make sure you use multibyte-aware string functions to work on those characters, like mb_strlen instead of strlen.
2. All characters relevant for HTML are still identical to their ASCII equivalent, so there’s nothing special about substituting HTML special chars. You should just make sure to set the $encoding parameter of htmlentities or htmlspecialchars.
3. Sure. Just make sure your database can store UTF-8 and you have set the database connection to UTF-8 so your database expects to receive UTF-8 encoded data. Google SET NAMES utf8.