Question

I want to use utf 8 right now , but all my data is latin1 , what is the efficient way to convert data . Also I know how to change database’s structure(charset) to utf8 , What I want to do is changing charset of existing data .

update

Here are my old setting ,

1. Html output : utf8
2. Html input : utf8
3. Php – mysql connection : latin1
4. mysql (fields and tables) : latin1

Here are my new settings , and I hope this is the best way to create multi-language website

1. Html output : utf8
2. Html input : utf8
3. Php – mysql connection : utf8
4. sql (fields and tables) : utf8

Answer 1

If you apply utf8_encode() to an already UTF8 string it will return a garbled UTF8 output.

I made a function that addresses all this issues. It´s called forceUTF8().

You dont need to know what the encoding of your strings is. It can be Latin1 (iso 8859-1) or UTF8, or the string can have a mix of the two. forceUTF8() will convert everything to UTF8.

I did it because a service was giving me a feed of data all messed up, mixing UTF8 and Latin1 in the same string.

Usage:

$utf8_string = forceUTF8($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

$latin1_string = forceLatin1($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

I’ve included another function, fixUFT8(), wich will fix every UTF8 string that looks garbled.

Usage:

$utf8_string = fixUTF8($garbled_utf8_string);

Examples:

echo fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");

echo fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");

echo fixUTF8("FÃÂédÃÂération Camerounaise de Football");

echo fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");

will output:

Fédération Camerounaise de Football

Fédération Camerounaise de Football

Fédération Camerounaise de Football

Fédération Camerounaise de Football

Update: I converted theese into a static class, and they live in Github now:

https://github.com/neitanod/forceutf8