PHP: Dealing special characters with iconv

php special-characters iconv

71,563

Solution 1

And did you save your source file in UTF-8 encoding? If not (and I guess you didn't since that will produce the "incomplete multibyte character" error), then try that first.

Solution 2

$clean = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', utf8_encode($s));

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Run

A cross-disciplinary full-stack web developer/designer.

Updated on May 30, 2020

Comments

Run almost 4 years

I still don't understand how iconv works.

For instance,

$string = "Löic & René";
$output = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $string);

I get,

Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an illegal character in input string in...

$string = "Löic"; or $string = "René";

I get,

Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an incomplete multibyte character in input string in.

I get nothing with $string = "&";

There are two sets of different outputs I need store them in the two different columns inside the table of my database,

I need to convert Löic & René to Loic & Rene for clean url purposes.
I need to keep them as they are - Löic & René as Löic & René then only convert them with htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES); when displaying them on my html page.

I tried with some of the suggestions in php.net below, but still don't work,

I had a situation where I needed some characters transliterated, but the others ignored (for weird diacritics like ayn or hamza). Adding //TRANSLIT//IGNORE seemed to do the trick for me. It transliterates everything that is able to be transliterated, but then throws out stuff that can't be.

So:

$string = "ʿABBĀSĀBĀD";

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $string);
// output: [nothing, and you get a notice]

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//IGNORE', $string);
// output: ABBSBD

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $string);
// output: ABBASABAD
// Yay! That's what I wanted!

and another,

Andries Seutens 07-Nov-2009 07:38
When doing transliteration, you have to make sure that your LC_COLLATE is properly set, otherwise the default POSIX will be used.

To transform "rené" into "rene" we could use the following code snippet:
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'nl_BE.utf8');

$string = 'rené';
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);

echo $string; // outputs rene

How can I actually work them out?

Thanks.

EDIT:

This is the source file I test the code,

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="no-js">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<?php
$string = "Löic & René";
$output = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $string); 
?>
</html>