Question

I am writing a webapp in ZF and am having serious issues with UTF8. It’s using multi lingual content through Zend Form and it seems that ZF heavily escapes all of these characters and basically just won’t show a field if there’s diacritical elements ‘é’ and if I use the HTML entity equivalent e.g. é it gets escaped so that the user will see ‘é’.

Zend Form allows for having non escaped data, but trying to use this is confusing, and it seems it’d need to be used all over the place.

So, I have been told that if the page and the text is in UTF8, no conversion to htmlentities is required. Is this true?

And if the last question is true, then how do I convert the source text to UTF8? I am comfortable setting up apache so that it sends a default UTF8 charset heading, and also adding the charset meta tag to the html, but doing this I am still getting messed up encoding. I have also tried opening the translation csv file in TextWrangler on OSX as UTF8, but it has done nothing.

Thanks!

L

Answer 1

‘é’ and if I use the HTML entity equivalent e.g. é it gets escaped so that the user will see ‘é’.

This I don’t understand. Can you show an example of how it is displayed, as opposed to how it should be displayed?

So, I have been told that if the page and the text is in UTF8, no conversion to htmlentities is required. Is this true?

Yup. In more detail: If the data you’re displaying and the encoding of the HTML page are both UTF-8, the multi-byte special characters will be displayed correctly.

And if the last question is true, then how do I convert the source text to UTF8?

Advanced editors and IDEs enable you to define what encoding the source file is saved in. You would need to open the file in its current encoding (with special characters being displayed correctly) and save it as UTF-8.

If the content is messed up when you have the right content-type header and/or meta tag specified, then the content is not UTF-8 yet. If you don’t get it sorted, post an example of what it looks like here.