Dealing with eacute and other special characters using Oracle, PHP and Oci8

Answer 1

I presume you are aware of these facts:

• There are many different character sets: you have to pick one and, of course, know which one you are using.
• Oracle is perfectly capable of storing text without HTML entities (é). HTML entities are used in, well, HTML. Oracle is not a web browser ;-)

You must also know that HTML entities are not bind to a specific charset; on the contrary, they're used to represent characters in a charset-independent context.

You indistinctly talk about ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. What charset do you want to use? ISO-8859-1 is easy to use but it can only store text in some latin languages (such as Spanish) and it lacks some common chars like the € symbol. UTF-8 is trickier to use but it can store all characters defined by the Unicode consortium (which include everything you'll ever need).

Once you've taken the decision, you must configure Oracle to hold data in such charset and choose an appropriate column type. E.g., VARCHAR2 is fine for plain ASCII, NVARCHAR2 is good for UTF-8.

Answer 2

This is what I finally ended up doing to solve this problem:

Modified the profile of the daemon running PHP to have:

NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1

So that the oci8 connection uses ISO-8859-1.

Then in my PHP configuration set the default content-type to ISO-8859-1:

default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

When I am inserting into an Oracle Table via oci8 from PHP, I do:

utf8_decode($my_sent_value)

And when receiving data from Oracle, printing the variable should just work as so:

echo $my_received_value

However when sending that data over ajax I have had to use:

utf8_encode($my_received_value)