Question

I have a HTML form that posts to PHP. I get a bunch of variables in PHP like for example:

$firstname = $_POST['firstname'];

etcetera. Later on, these variables are printed to a PDF file I’m generating with PHP.

However, many times the form is submitted with ‘special characters’ like ë, é, ü, etcetera. I want to preserve those characters. At this moment, those characters are printed to the PDF as:

é ë

How do I preserve the accented characters?

Answer 1

Make sure character encoding is correct:

• The form should be on a page that has a charset of UTF-8
• You may need to call utf8_encode or utf8_decode, based on the values you get on the server
• Double-check that the PDF’s character encoding is UTF-8.