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Saving special characters to DB then display using PHP

Answer 1

A:

The fact that there are 3 bad characters in the output suggests that the RSS feed is being interpreted so that the HTML character reference is converted to UTF-8.

Try setting the text encoding of your display page to UTF-8 by adding the following to the output HTML in the <head> section:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Alternatively, since this is PHP you can set the HTTP header directly:

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
?>

However, a better solution might be to avoid converting the entity in the first place. Have you got a call to html_entity_decode() in the code that retrieves the RSS feed? If so, then it might be wise to remove it.

Anthony Williams 2010-09-23 10:02:59

Answer 2

+1 A:

You need to make sure that the encoding of the RSS feed is the same as in your DB. Otherwise you first need to convert the content.

The encoding of the feed should be in the XML header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

You can use this function to convert it to the encoding you use in the DB (preferably UTF-8):

http://php.net/manual/function.mb-convert-encoding.php

slosd 2010-09-23 10:04:16

Answer 3

A:

When you use UTF-8 then make sure you set the database connection to utf-8.. f.e. in mysql

SET NAMES 'utf-8';

Then set the correct output content-type like described by Anthony Williams. At best you do both: set the META Content-Type and send the Content-Type HTTP-Header.

Since your application seems to decode the htmlentities of that cached RSS feed before writing them to the DB, you may also output them like you got them in the first place

<?php echo htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?>

Jan. 2010-09-23 10:21:16

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Saving special characters to DB then display using PHP

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