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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T20:12:26+00:00

I’m just trying to understand character encoding a bit better, so I’m doing a

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I’m just trying to understand character encoding a bit better, so I’m doing a few tests.

I have a PHP file that is saved as UTF-8 and looks like this:

<?php
declare(encoding='UTF-8');

header( 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
?><!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Test</title>
</head>

<body>
    <?php echo "\xBD"; # Does not work ?>
    <?php echo htmlentities( "\xBD" ) ; # Works ?>
</body>

</html>

The page itself shows this:

enter image description here

The gist of the problem is that my web application has a bunch of character encoding problems, where people are copying and pasting from Outlook or Word and the characters get transformed into the diamond question marks (Do those have a real name?)

I’m trying to learn how to make sure all my input is transformed into UTF-8 when the page loads (Basically $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST), and all output is done using proper UTF-8 handling methods.

My question is: Why is my page showing the question mark for the first echo, and does anyone have any other information about making a UTF-8 safe web app in PHP?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    0xBD is not valid UTF-8. If you want to encode “½” in UTF-8 then you need to use 0xC2 0xBD instead.

    >>> print '\xc2\xbd'.decode('utf-8')
½

    If you want to use text from another charset (Latin-1 in this case) then you need to transcode it to UTF-8 first using the various iconv or mb functions.

    Also:

    $ charinfo �
U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
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