Question

I’m writing a small web app that will receive and parse tab-delimited text files from users. Those files will either be uploaded via a textarea or a multipart/form-data form. Those files will be in a variety of charsets, including Asian and the like. In consequence I am trying to use utf-8 throughout the app.

The site is entirely (as far as I know) in UTF-8:

• Each php file is saved in utf-8 encoding;
• I have added default_charset = "utf-8" in my php.ini file;

• The HTML header contains the required utf-8 mentions:

  header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');
  ...
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  ...
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
  

• The textarea forms contain the accept-charset="UTF-8" tag.

• The db is collated in utf-8;
• Each connection to the db includes the option 1002 => 'SET NAMES utf8'.

Now, I just discovered that I needed to set mb_regex_encoding to utf-8 manually for one of my parsing function to work (I use mb_split() to identify & replace tabs and new lines). So …

What else do I need to do to make sure my site is once and for all utf-8 throughout? In particular, are there any other encoding function I should set, such as mb_internal_encoding(), and if so where in the code should I do that (e.g., at the start of the index.php file?

Answer 1

I can think of two more things;

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

…as early as possible in the PHP script, and

mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8');

…to set the connection charset, if you’re using MySql. For PDO, you can specify it with the connection string:

"mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db;charset=utf8"