Convert encoding (ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8)

PHP
1

Hello,

I’m having problems with converting ISO-8859-1 encoded text to UTF-8 encoding with some special chars.

For example:

$str = 'blah – - test';
echo utf8_encode($str);

will output:

blah – - test

The problem appears if I have one of those chars in the text: –, ’, “, etc…

If I try converting it using iconv (with translit or ignore option), i get the same result:

echo iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $str);

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

Perhaps those characters don’t exist in UTF-8? Is there any solution to know substitutions for them?

Thanks a lot for help!

2

$str is probably not really encoded as iso-8859-1. Those angled quote characters, and probably that weird hyphen character don’t existing in that character set.

For starters, if your goal is utf8, and you’re using a web browser and web page to view and test this, you need to set the proper http header so the browser understands the encoding.


header('content-type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');

Be aware that the encoding you set your text editor to plays a part here if you’re pasting string literals into the file. The editor might be doing some conversions. Some editors behave differently in how and when they convert, so I would try to avoid testing like this and just get the data from wherever it comes from, like the db.

Personally I usually look at the byte values in the string


print_r(array_map('ord', str_split($str)));

And then from there try to match it up with an encoding by looking at the byte values, and how many/which bytes are used to represent certain characters.

In your case, I think you’ll probably want to be looking at windows 1252 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

3

Already answered, Nonetheless if you know already what you want to see in place of these special chars, you may consider replacing these chars with your own text/words/no utf chars. And if you disagree, then you may try out the other angel of it, by trying to know the meaning of it through byte chars as said already.

4

Set your page headers like mentioned above and try something like this:

echo iconv(‘UTF-8’, ‘ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE’, $str);

Should take care of most things.