Question

So I tried to use Chinese characters as the keys for my PHP associative array, but then when I print_r’ed the array, it printed out a whole bunch of garbage instead.

What needs to be done so that I can use Chinese characters for my PHP array keys?

Displaying chinese characters as string work fine though. It’s just when I placed them as array keys when it stops working…

eg:

$j = array();
$j[utf8_encode('大')] = 1;
$f = array_keys($j);
echo utf8_decode($f[0]);

Answer 1

To show case a very simple case of using Chinese character in associate key :-

php > $a = array("一定可以"=>TRUE);
php > var_dump($a["一定可以"]);
bool(true)
php > print_r($a);
Array
(
    [一定可以] => 1
)

Here is the example if you apply utf8_encode and utf8_decode:

php > $j = array(); $j[utf8_encode('大')] = 1; $f = array_keys($j); echo utf8_decode($f[0]);
大
php > print_r($f);
Array
(
    [0] => 大  /* this is garbled */
)
php > print_r($j);
Array
(
    [大] => 1 /* this is garbled too */
)

One possible way to overcome:

php > print_r(utf8_decode(var_export($j, TRUE)));
array (
  '大' => 1,
)