Question

I have a file on my computer that I wanted to copy into a MySQL table using PHP. When I open the file the contents look fine, like normal text – but, when I attempt to read the file using PHP or insert into a MySQL table, I get all sorts of funky characters. I thought perhaps it was a utf-8 issue, so I tried setting the header

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

And then echoing the contents retrieved by file_get_contents(), but that didn’t make any difference – the output was still funky. I then thought perhaps it was a cp1252 issue so I tried using htmlentities() but that also didn’t help:

htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'cp1252')

I then uploaded the file to a website (here). On the server when I ‘cat’ the file, it again looks normal, but in Firefox when I open it I get the funky characters. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like to me: screenshot

Oddly I copied the same exact file to another website’s folder on the same server, and yet when I open this file at the new URL (see here) the same file appears different in Firefox – still some funky characters, but less of them. A screenshot of the different appearance: screenshot

Does anybody know what’s going on here, and how I can clean the characters up? What character encoding is this file using – and why does the same file look different in Firefox when copied from one website on the server to another?

Answer 1

Your file is in UTF-16; try using that as the encoding in Firefox. It looks much more correct, though there are still some stray CJK characters, which may be because some of your characters are in the wrong endianness.

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