Question

I need help with a character encoding problem that I want to sort once and for all. Here is an example of some content which I pull from a XML feed, insert into my database and then pull out.

As you can not see, a lot of special html characters get corrupted/broken.

How can I once and for all stop this? How am I able to support all types of characters, etc.?

I’ve tried literally every piece of coding I can find, it sometimes corrects it for most but still others are corrupted.

Answer 1

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

/**
 * Encodes HTML safely for UTF-8. Use instead of htmlentities. 
 *
 * @param string $var 
 * @return string 
 */
function html_encode($var)
{
    return htmlentities($var, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}

Those two rescued me and I think it is now working. I’ll come back if I continue to encounter problems. Should I store it in the DB, eg as “&” or as “&”?