Question

I am trying to loop through a set of javascript files, detect their encoding and then save them both in latin1 and in utf8 format. So far I have really gotten stuck at trying to get PHP to convert a UTF-8 file to Latin1. I have tried several different methods of encoding the data after searching around but nothing seems to work.

Here is what I am doing:

//Read file 
$fileIn = fopen($dirName . $fileNameIn, 'r');
$dataIn = fread($fileIn, filesize($dirName . $fileNameIn));
fclose($fileIn);

$encoding = mb_detect_encoding($dataIn);
echo "Encoding in: " . $encoding . "\r\n";

$dataOut = utf8_decode($dataIn);

echo "Encoding after: " . mb_detect_encoding($dataOut) . "\r\n";

Both of these printouts print UTF-8 as the detected encoding. Any ideas?

Could this have anything to do with the fact that the system default on my ubuntu box is UTF-8?

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at the iconv function (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.iconv.php):

string iconv ( string $in_charset , string $out_charset , string $str )

Therefore, try writing

 $dataOut = iconv($encoding, "ISO-8859-1", $dataIn);

and see if that fixes the problem. Also, try using strict mode in mb_detect_encoding:

mb_detect_encoding($dataOut, mb_detect_order(), true);