characters changed in a Curl request.

Question

When I look at the XML data feed i get with the below code, special characters are correct in the XML code. However when Curl returns the data, characters like "ó" and "ä" are converted into resp. "ó" and "ä". This conversion happens to all special characters, these 2 are just an example.

$myvar = curl_init();
$myURL = "http://someurl.com/";
curl_setopt($myvar, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, '[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2")]');
curl_setopt($myvar, CURLOPT_URL, $myURL);
curl_setopt($myvar, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($myvar, CURLOPT_TRANSFERTEXT, TRUE);
curl_setopt($myvar, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,3);
$xmlstr = curl_exec ($myvar);

The header of the XML file says to encode as follows "?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?"

All I want is to get the same characters to show up in the Curl result without any transformation.

Hoping i just missed some plain easy step, looking forward to any answers.

Best regards Fons

Answer 1

How do you know $xmlstr contains the wrong bytes? If you're looking at the output in a terminal window of some sort, it's probable that the problem is that the terminal does not support UTF-8, not that cURL is broken.

cURL doesn't care about UTF-8 or any other character encoding - its job is just to fetch a sequence of bytes from somewhere. It's not likely to be doing anything that will mangle special characters. If there's something wrong with the way you're using cURL, it'll be mangling everything, not just non-ASCII characters.