Setting PHP default encoding to utf-8?

Question

In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the char 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 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 semi-colon 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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

Modify the line

;default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

to read

default_charset = "utf-8"

About the other options, do not touch them. Avoid default settings, always explicitly set the encoding of in everything you do

• database connections,
• reading and writing files,
• converting with iconv.

Also, beware of the encoding in which your PHP files are saved, make sure that they are in UTF-8, especially if they contain strings to be displayed or compared.

Solution 3

I had a problem on my MySQL query that it would not recognize some Latin accentuation, so the query would fail. I thought it could be the PHP file and so on, till I found out that using PDO to call the MySQL function I had to add the character set. The weird thing is that on the previous server I used it worked fine!

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=retirodo_main;charset=utf8';
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ^^^^^^^^^^^^

Comments

[JDelage]

For Apache, I don't have an http.conf file. I use WAMPserver and they ship Apache with an httpd.conf file. I suppose they're the same thing? Also, is that a line you manually add? There's nothing about charset in my httpd.conf file.

[Ben D]

that was actually a typo on my part (corrected). If you don't see a reference to AddDefaultCharset in the config file, you may want to look through the config included files (it will some something like Include conf/extra/[something]) to see if it is set in any of those. If not, just add it to the main httpd.conf file.

[CMCDragonkai]

Is there some sort of explanation explaining what all those encoding functions do?

[Ben D]

@CMCDragonkai - are you just asking for a general explanation of character encoding, or specifically what the listed settings control?

[CMCDragonkai]

The listed settings. There's lots from iconv and mb_string.

[Miguel]

@Marcos when you edited the answer i see the bold was lost, and translated to " ** " ... The asnwer should not be that text you see. Since thats the bold markdown.

[Marcos Pérez Gude]

Fixed, @miguel, sorry

[Kiran]

no need to use AddDefaultCharset in http.conf. see httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html. meta will override this.

[Peter Mortensen]

What do you mean by "without the dash"? They look the same.