Question

In my project I currently use htmlentities() to filter data coming from the database:

echo htmlentities($variable_name);

I am in the USA and this works fine for me. My friend is in Brazil and for him some text characters don’t show up correctly.

How can I use htmlentities() so it internationalizes properly?

Answer 1

The problem could be that the output is not encoded in UTF-8. According to the php docs for htmlentities, the function

takes an optional third argument
charset which defines character set
used in conversion. Presently, the
ISO-8859-1 character set is used as
the default.

So you can try calling

htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

instead, and that might fix the problem, since it’s not the default character encoding.