Question

I am developping a Zend application. The data in my database is encoded in “utf8_unicode_ci”.
I declared in my application.ini :

resources.view.encoding = "UTF-8"

but whenever I try to retrieve a String containing special characters like

{‘é’, ‘à’, ‘è’,…} in the db, the string doesn’t display unless I use the function : utf8_decode()

So I tried to set the charset to UTF-8 in :

Bootstrap :

protected function _initDoctype() {
      $this->bootstrap('view');
      $view = $this->getResource('view');
      $view->doctype('XHTML_STRICT');
      $view->setEncoding('UTF-8');
 }

 protected function _initFrontControllerOutput() {

    $this->bootstrap('FrontController');
    $frontController = $this->getResource('FrontController');

    $response = new Zend_Controller_Response_Http;
    $response->setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=UTF-8', true);
    $frontController->setResponse($response);

    $frontController->setParam('useDefaultControllerAlways', false);

    return $frontController;
}

Layout :

$this->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', 'text/html;charset=utf8');
echo $this->headMeta();

application.ini :

resources.view.encoding = "UTF-8"
resources.db.params.charset = "utf8"

EDIT : Now I can display special chars in a page, but when I retrieve elements from the database, special chars are not displayed.

• an escaped string returns null ($this->escape($string))
• echo $string substitutes special chars with ?

so I still have to use utf8_decode() to display them. Any suggestion ?

thanks for your help !!

Answer 1

Maybe you should try to edit your source files keeping UTF-8 as your editor’s encoding. Sometimes even if you use UTF-8 in your HTML headers, database encoding, etc, if your source files are in a different encoding, this could lead to that kind of errors.