Question

I am retrieving the nearest locations available from a given address (Longitude/Latitude) from geolocation website.
It works fine, but for some places it gives junk characters in the name. Moreover, in browser I am getting different characters compared to my PHP CURL functionality.
Here is the URL

http://www.geoplugin.net/extras/nearby.gp?lat=17.7374669&long=83.3214858&limit=5&radius=50&format=php

One of the location is “Sitammapeta” in original location name, but in browser I am getting “Sītammapeta” where as in CURL function I am getting “SÄ«tammapeta”.

Please tell me why this difference. I wrote a function to convert browser output to original which works fine.

function convert ($old)
    {
        $n="";
        for ($i=0; $i<strlen($old); $i++)
        {
            $n .= chr(ord(substr($old,$i,1)));
        }
        return $n;
    }

But I dont understand how I convert the CURL output to original name.

EDIT
CURL code

$ch = curl_init();
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $host);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'geoPlugin PHP Class v1.0');
            $response = curl_exec($ch);
            curl_close ($ch);

Answer 1

The problem is that you’re displaying the data in your web-browser, that the data your sending is UTF-8 encoded and that your browser has no idea about that. If you add <meta charset="utf-8" /> or <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> to the head of your HTML document, that should solve your problem.

Without the charset defined as UTF-8:

With <meta charset="utf-8" /> or <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">:

Alternatively, you could have your PHP script send a content-type header using header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8'); (or replace text/html with text/plain if you want to use plain text).

Reference:

According to RFC2616 Section 3.7.1:

When no explicit charset parameter is
provided by the sender, media subtypes
of the “text” type are defined to have
a default charset value of
“ISO-8859-1” when received via HTTP.

That means that if you don’t specify a charset, ISO-8859-1 will (should) be used, and as such, some characters won’t be displayed properly if the data is UTF-8 encoded.