Question

When using the following code:

$myString = 'some contents';    
$fh=fopen('newfile.txt',"w");
fwrite($fh, "\xEF\xBB\xBF" . $myString);

Is there any point of using PHP functions to first encode the text ($myString in the example) e.g. like running utf8_encode($myString); or similar iconv() commands?

Assuming that the BOM \xEF\xBB\xBF is first inputted into the file and that UTF8 represents practically all characters in the world I don’t see any potential failure scenarion of creating a file this way. In other words I don’t see any case where any major text editor wouldn’t be able to interpret the newly created file corectly, displaying all characters as intended. This even if $myString would be a PHP $_POST variable from a HTML form. Am I right?

Answer 1

If your source file is UTF-8 encoded, then the string $myString is also UTF-8 encoded, you don’t need to convert it. Otherwise, you need to use iconv() to convert the encoding first before write it to the file.

And note utf8_encode() is used to encode an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8.