Question

I have the following test script on my server:

<?php
echo "Test is: " . $_GET['test'];
?>

If I call it with a url like example.com/script.php?test=ɿ (ɿ being a multibyte character), the resulting page looks like this:

Test is: É¿

If I try to do anything with the value in $_GET[‘test’], such as save it a mysql database, I have the same problem. What do I need to to do make PHP handle this value correctly?

Answer 1

Have you told the user agent your HTTP response is UTF-8?

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

You might also want to ensure your HTML markup declares the encoding also, e.g.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

For your database, are your tables and mysql client settings set up for UTF-8? If you check your database using a mysql command line client, is your terminal environment set up to expect UTF-8?

In a nutshell, you must check every step: from the raw source data, the code which touches it, the storage systems which retain it, and the tools you use to display and debug it.