Project conversion from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8

Question

I coded a php project under ISO 8859-1, and for some technical reasons I want to encode the project under UTF-8. what is a better way to do it? I am afraid of loosing special characters like french accents and so on. thanks for you advice.

Answer 1

transcode all the files with iconv. change any and all http headers or meta tags. profit.

Answer 2

You should try using the shell command iconv to encode the php files from latin1 (ISO-8859-1) to UTF-8.

After that you should be sure that PHP uses UTF-8 as the default encoding (default_encoding variable in php.ini if I recall correctly). If not, then you can set it with ini_set() for your project.

After that you should convert your database to UTF-8 or use a quickfix like this (for MySQL):

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Of course you just substitute mysql_query() for whatever framework you use (if you use any). Put it into your primary file which includes all the classes and stuff.

Answer 3

Here's my take on your question - you want the generated HTML (via PHP) to be UTF-8 compliant? Be aware that the HTML 4.x standard is based on iso-8859-1 and it's unclear if XHTML is based on utf-8 or iso-8859-1. Of course, pure XML is utf-8.

(1) So the first piece of the puzzle is to select your DOCTYPE for your rendered HTML.

(2) Make sure you add the the language character set meta tags (charset=utf8), etc.

(3) Take the rendered PHP/HTML string and send it through iconv either via the shell using a system call or through some PHP API method.

The resulting rendered HTML will be utf-8 encoded. The client browser needs to be set to render the HTML by means of utf-8 and not western latin1. Otherwise you get a strange non-breaking space character in the upper left hand corner of the page.