Question

Well, apparently, PHP and it’s standard libraries have some problems, and DOMDocument isn’t an exception.

There are workarounds for utf8 characters when loading HTML string – $dom->loadHTML().

Apparently, I haven’t found a way to do this when loading HTML from file – $dom->loadHTMLFile(). While it reads and sets the encoding from <meta /> tags, the problem strikes back if I haven’t defined those. For instance, when loading a fragment of HTML (template part, like, footer.html), not a fully built HTML document.

So, how do I preserve utf8 characters, when loading HTML from file, that hasn’t got it’s <meta /> keys present, and defining those is not an option?

Update

footer.html (the file is encoded in UTF-8 without BOM):

<div id="footer">
    <p>My sūpēr ōzōm ūtf8 štrīņģ</p>
</div>

index.php:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile('footer.html');
echo $dom->saveHTML(); // results in all familiar effed' up characters

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

While I’m not sure about how to go about solving the problem with ->loadHTMLFile(), have you considered using file_get_contents() to get the HTML, run mb_convert_encoding() on that string, then pass that value in to ->loadHTML()?

Edit: Also, when you initialize DOMDocument, are you giving it the $encoding argument?