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Asked: 2026-05-20T18:33:17+00:00

How can I show any character encoding in a HTML text area? I currently

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How can I show any character encoding in a HTML text area?

I currently take in a users HTML page via direct input (textarea) and then I parse it by changing href links to something else via PHP and then I echo out the parsed HTML back to the user on a different page in a textarea.

However, I get square characters for chinese characters and I am wondering how I can handle this and do this for all languages or character encoding?

As a side note, I store the parsed HTML in my DB base64_encoded which works well, this was achieved with the help of SO with a previous question I had.

Thanks all for any help on how I can fix this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If the data appears healthy in your database, the problem is not on the user input side. (verify this by accessing your database ‘directly’ – eg. through Sequel Pro or PHPMyAdmin – and running the data in it through a base64 de-coder).

    If the data is healthy, then the reason your data isn’t showing up properly in the textfield is probably because the browser is expecting text in a different encoding from the one you’re sending in.

    My advice: when loading the data from the database, after base64 decoding, make sure it is UTF8-encoded before you send it back to the browser, and send the following header to the browser before you output anything else:

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

    I hope that solves the issue for you.

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