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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T01:18:57+00:00

In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the character encoding

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In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the character encoding of outgoing data to UTF-8, it is necessary to edit the default_encoding configuration to utf-8.

However, I cannot find this configuration in file php.ini. Should I simply add a line that would say default_encoding = "utf-8"?

I do have a ;default_charset = "iso-8859-1". As you can see (;), right now it is not activated. Should I remove the semicolon and set it to "utf-8"? Does that take care of the default encoding?

I also found other encoding directives that I don’t know what to do about:

[iconv]
;iconv.input_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.internal_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.output_encoding = ISO-8859-1
...
; http://php.net/exif.encode-unicode
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
...
;mssql.charset = "ISO-8859-1"
...
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15

Is there any reason why I shouldn’t simply replace them all with utf-8?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You should set your default_charset to UTF-8:

    default_charset = "utf-8"

    (PHP Cookbook may have a typo in it if they ask you to change the default_encoding — I’ve never heard of it.)

    You’ll also want to make sure that your web server is set to output UTF-8 if you’re going to outputting UTF-8 encoded characters. In Apache, this can be set by in the httpd.conf file:

    AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

    As for modifying the iconv, exif, and mssql encoding settings, you probably don’t need to set these (your settings have these commented out anyhow), but it’s a good idea to change them all to UTF-8 anyhow.

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