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Asked: 2026-05-26T08:57:48+00:00

I have a webpage that outputs a string that contains accented characters. I have

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I have a webpage that outputs a string that contains accented characters.

I have the variable $myGlobalStr that is declared in the main page, and then is returned via the function outputGlobalVariable(). Everything work as expected.

When I declare that very same string within the function outputFunctionVariable(), the output is in UTF-8 format..

I tried to use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> in my page, ad I also tried to include header('Content-type: text/html; iso-8859-1') at the beginning of my include file. Both doesn’t work.

I never had to specify a charset in an include file before. I know I can use the function utf8_decode() in outputFunctionVariable() but I’m interested to understand why it’s happening and the logical behind this…

I’m using Zend Server CE on Windows.

index.php

<?
    $myGlobalStr = "1. Dites bonjour à l'élève.";
    include("includes/functions.php");
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
    <title>Test</title>
</head>

<body>

<?=outputGlobalVariable()?>
<hr>
<?=outputLocalVariable()?>

</body>
</html>

functions.php

<?
    function outputGlobalVariable() {
        global $myGlobalStr;

        return $myGlobalStr;
    }

    function outputLocalVariable() {
        $myStr = "2. Dites bonjour à l'élève.";

        return $myStr;
    }
?>

output

1. Dites bonjour à l'élève.
------------
2. Dites bonjour à l'élève.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    One of the files contains the strings in ISO-8859-1, and the other as UTF-8 string.
    Now that your page is declared with the Latin-1 charset, the latter will come out with garbage characters.

    Don’t mix the two. Either identify the UTF-8 script and convert it back to Latin-1. Or move to UTF-8 for everything.

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