Question

I’m developing a site with codeigniter that support multilanguage. When a user search with their native language I got the first result when I paginate the result the character is not decoding.

This is the url which is used to paginate.

When I print the uri segment I got %E0%B4%AE

I tried the url encode and url decode that time I got a different charecter like à´®

Can any one tell me how can I decode this type of charecterset?

Answer 1

While urldecode is what you should be using, the reason that you are getting the wrong output printed is probably because the output page’s encoding hasn’t been set to UTF-8, and is thus defaulting to ISO-8859-1. Hence, while the characters have been decoded correctly by PHP, the browser then interprets the characters in the wrong encoding, resulting in incorrect display.

To fix the problem, send a charset in the Content-type header before any output like so:

header('Content-type: <type>; charset=utf-8');

If your output page is HTML, you could alternatively use this tag in the head:

<meta charset="utf-8">

If you take the second option, be sure to place the tag as early as possible in the head, as browsers do not scan past the first 1024 bytes of the page for this declaration.