Question

I’m dealing with a LAMP web server. I have forms that users use to submit text that is stored in a text field in mysql. Often this text is copied and pasted from Microsoft Office products, so I’m getting a lot of smart quotes and emdashes. These characters display properly if I retrieve them from the database and display them on the webpage, but where I’m running into trouble is sending the text in an email using the phpmailer class. I get stuff that looks like this: – (where it should be an emdash).

One thing that may be important: If I pull up a console in mysql and select a field that has an emdash or smart quote in it, it will display on my console incorrectly: –, however, as stated above, if my php page (using PDO) selects the field and displays it, it will display correctly in a browser (as an emdash in this case).

I’m not sure if there’s a way to select a character set in phpmailer, (maybe it’s a simple setting somewhere?) or if there is a better way around this problem. I think I should be clear, though, that “search and replace smart quotes and emdashes with their regular equivalents” is NOT the answer I’m looking for (hopefully that’s not the only solution).

I found this information:
My php webpage: utf-8
mysql client encoding: latin1
mysql server encoding: latin1
phpmailer character set: iso-8859-1

Answer 1

Character set can be switched in phpmailer with the following code:

$myMail->CharSet  = "UTF-8";

This solved my issue. Typographic quotes and double dashes show up in my emails from phpmailer as expected now. This may have been a sorta noobish question (blush). Thanks, Col. Shrapnel for prompting me to look into what encoding all the pieces of the puzzle were using. I’d vote you up but don’t have the reputation.

For anyone interested in homework, this link really helped me understand the basics of encoding:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html