Question

Currently I’m using a php web service to retrieve the information from MySQL.
I’m dealing with multiple languages including chinese/japanese/french characters, I’m having issues displaying chinese/japanese and a few other languages.

<?php

    echo "你好";

?>

For example, when I’m trying to echo simple chinese characters, what shows is “ä½ å¥½” instead, I’m not sure how to proceed.

Please advise.

Thank you

Answer 1

You should probably set the character encoding.

This is traditionally done by setting the html content-type header. The default is usually:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

You can change this via php by using the header() function.

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

Some other resources for you:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encodings_in_HTML