(PHP 4 >= 4.0.6, PHP 5)
mb_convert_encoding — Convert character encoding
Converts the character encoding of string str to to_encoding from optionally from_encoding.
The string being encoded.
The type of encoding that str is being converted to.
Is specified by character code names before conversion. It is either an array, or a comma separated enumerated list. If from_encoding is not specified, the internal encoding will be used.
"auto" may be used, which expands to "ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS".
The encoded string.
Beispiel #1 mb_convert_encoding() example
<?php
/* Convert internal character encoding to SJIS */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "SJIS");
/* Convert EUC-JP to UTF-7 */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-7", "EUC-JP");
/* Auto detect encoding from JIS, eucjp-win, sjis-win, then convert str to UCS-2LE */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UCS-2LE", "JIS, eucjp-win, sjis-win");
/* "auto" is expanded to "ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS" */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "EUC-JP", "auto");
?>
If you want to convert japanese to ISO-2022-JP it is highly recommended to use ISO-2022-JP-MS as the target encoding instead. This includes the extended character set and avoids ? in the text. For example the often used "1 in a circle" ① will be correctly converted then.
I've been trying to find the charset of a norwegian (with a lot of ø, æ, å) txt file written on a Mac, i've found it in this way:
<?php
$text = "A strange string to pass, maybe with some ø, æ, å characters.";
foreach(mb_list_encodings() as $chr){
echo mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', $chr)." : ".$chr."<br>";
}
?>
The line that looks good, gives you the encoding it was written in.
Hope can help someone
Note that `mb_convert_encoding($val, 'HTML-ENTITIES')` does not escape '\'', '"', '<', '>', or '&'.
It appears that when dealing with an unknown "from encoding" the function will both throw an E_WARNING and proceed to convert the string from ISO-8859-1 to the "to encoding".
I used this function insted mb_convert_encoding, because mbstring wasn't enabled at my comercial server. It only suports utf7, 8 e iso 8859-1:
<?php
function my_convert_encoding($string,$to,$from)
{
// Convert string to ISO_8859-1
if ($from == "UTF-8")
$iso_string = utf8_decode($string);
else
if ($from == "UTF7-IMAP")
$iso_string = imap_utf7_decode($string);
else
$iso_string = $string;
// Convert ISO_8859-1 string to result coding
if ($to == "UTF-8")
return(utf8_encode($iso_string));
else
if ($to == "UTF7-IMAP")
return(imap_utf7_encode($iso_string));
else
return($iso_string);
}
?>
instead of ini_set(), you can try this
mb_substitute_character("none");
aaron, to discard unsupported characters instead of printing a ?, you might as well simply set the configuration directive:
mbstring.substitute_character = "none"
in your php.ini. Be sure to include the quotes around none. Or at run-time with
<?php
ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none");
?>
My solution below was slightly incorrect, so here is the correct version (I posted at the end of a long day, never a good idea!)
Again, this is a quick and dirty solution to stop mb_convert_encoding from filling your string with question marks whenever it encounters an illegal character for the target encoding.
<?php
function convert_to ( $source, $target_encoding )
{
// detect the character encoding of the incoming file
$encoding = mb_detect_encoding( $source, "auto" );
// escape all of the question marks so we can remove artifacts from
// the unicode conversion process
$target = str_replace( "?", "[question_mark]", $source );
// convert the string to the target encoding
$target = mb_convert_encoding( $target, $target_encoding, $encoding);
// remove any question marks that have been introduced because of illegal characters
$target = str_replace( "?", "", $target );
// replace the token string "[question_mark]" with the symbol "?"
$target = str_replace( "[question_mark]", "?", $target );
return $target;
}
?>
Hope this helps someone! (Admins should feel free to delete my previous, incorrect, post for clarity)
-A
If mb_convert_encoding doesn't work for you, and iconv gives you a headache, you might be interested in this free class I found. It can convert almost any charset to almost any other charset. I think it's wonderful and I wish I had found it earlier. It would have saved me tons of headache.
I use it as a fail-safe, in case mb_convert_encoding is not installed. Download it from http://mikolajj.republika.pl/
This is not my own library, so technically it's not spamming, right? ;)
Hope this helps.
For the php-noobs (like me) - working with flash and php.
Here's a simple snippet of code that worked great for me, getting php to show special Danish characters, from a Flash email form:
<?php
// Name Escape
$escName = mb_convert_encoding($_POST["Name"], "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8");
// message escape
$escMessage = mb_convert_encoding($_POST["Message"], "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8");
// Headers.. and so on...
?>
rodrigo at bb2 dot co dot jp wrote that inconv works better than mb_convert_encoding, I find that when converting from uft8 to shift_jis
$conv_str = mb_convert_encoding($str,$toCS,$fromCS);
works while
$conv_str = iconv($fromCS,$toCS.'//IGNORE',$str);
removes tildes from $str.
Clean a string for use as filename by simply replacing all unwanted characters with underscore (ASCII converts to 7bit). It removes slightly more chars than necessary. Hope its useful.
$fileName = 'Test:!"$%&/()=ÖÄÜöäü<<';
echo strtr(mb_convert_encoding($fileName,'ASCII'),
' ,;:?*#!§$%&/(){}<>=`´|\\\'"',
'____________________________');
For those who can´t use mb_convert_encoding() to convert from one charset to another as a metter of lower version of php, try iconv().
I had this problem converting to japanese charset:
$txt=mb_convert_encoding($txt,'SJIS',$this->encode);
And I could fix it by using this:
$txt = iconv('UTF-8', 'SJIS', $txt);
Maybe it´s helpfull for someone else! ;)
To petruzanauticoyahoo?com!ar
If you don't specify a source encoding, then it assumes the internal (default) encoding. ñ is a multi-byte character whose bytes in your configuration default (often iso-8859-1) would actually mean ñ. mb_convert_encoding() is upgrading those characters to their multi-byte equivalents within UTF-8.
Try this instead:
<?php
print mb_convert_encoding( "ñ", "UTF-8", "UTF-8" );
?>
Of course this function does no work (for the most part - it can actually be used to strip characters which are not valid for UTF-8).
Hey guys. For everybody who's looking for a function that is converting an iso-string to utf8 or an utf8-string to iso, here's your solution:
public function encodeToUtf8($string) {
return mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", mb_detect_encoding($string, "UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15", true));
}
public function encodeToIso($string) {
return mb_convert_encoding($string, "ISO-8859-1", mb_detect_encoding($string, "UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15", true));
}
For me these functions are working fine. Give it a try
When converting Japanese strings to ISO-2022-JP or JIS on PHP >= 5.2.1, you can use "ISO-2022-JP-MS" instead of them.
Kishu-Izon (platform dependent) characters are converted correctly with the encoding, as same as with eucJP-win or with SJIS-win.
As an alternative to Johannes's suggestion for converting strings from other character sets to a 7bit representation while not just deleting latin diacritics, you might try this:
<?php
$text = iconv($from_enc, 'US-ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text);
?>
The only disadvantage is that it does not convert "ä" to "ae", but it handles punctuation and other special characters better.
--
David
I'd like to share some code to convert latin diacritics to their
traditional 7bit representation, like, for example,
- à,ç,é,î,... to a,c,e,i,...
- ß to ss
- ä,Ä,... to ae,Ae,...
- ë,... to e,...
(mb_convert "7bit" would simply delete any offending characters).
I might have missed on your country's typographic
conventions--correct me then.
<?php
/**
* @args string $text line of encoded text
* string $from_enc (encoding type of $text, e.g. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1)
*
* @returns 7bit representation
*/
function to7bit($text,$from_enc) {
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text,'HTML-ENTITIES',$from_enc);
$text = preg_replace(
array('/ß/','/&(..)lig;/',
'/&([aouAOU])uml;/','/&(.)[^;]*;/'),
array('ss',"$1","$1".'e',"$1"),
$text);
return $text;
}
?>
Enjoy :-)
Johannes
For those wanting to convert from $set to MacRoman, use iconv():
<?php
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'macintosh', $string);
?>
('macintosh' is the IANA name for the MacRoman character set.)
many people below talk about using
<?php
mb_convert_encode($s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8');
?>
to convert non-ascii code into html-readable stuff. Due to my webserver being out of my control, I was unable to set the database character set, and whenever PHP made a copy of my $s variable that it had pulled out of the database, it would convert it to nasty latin1 automatically and not leave it in it's beautiful UTF-8 glory.
So [insert korean characters here] turned into ?????.
I found myself needing to pass by reference (which of course is deprecated/nonexistent in recent versions of PHP)
so instead of
<?php
mb_convert_encode(&$s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8');
?>
which worked perfectly until I upgraded, so I had to use
<?php
call_user_func_array('mb_convert_encoding', array(&$s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8'));
?>
Hope it helps someone else out
Why did you use the php html encode functions? mbstring has it's own Encoding which is (as far as I tested it) much more usefull:
HTML-ENTITIES
Example:
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
To add to the Flash conversion comment below, here's how I convert back from what I've stored in a database after converting from Flash HTML text field output, in order to load it back into a Flash HTML text field:
function htmltoflash($htmlstr)
{
return str_replace("<br />","\n",
str_replace("<","<",
str_replace(">",">",
mb_convert_encoding(html_entity_decode($htmlstr),
"UTF-8","ISO-8859-1"))));
}
Here's a tip for anyone using Flash and PHP for storing HTML output submitted from a Flash text field in a database or whatever.
Flash submits its HTML special characters in UTF-8, so you can use the following function to convert those into HTML entity characters:
function utf8html($utf8str)
{
return htmlentities(mb_convert_encoding($utf8str,"ISO-8859-1","UTF-8"));
}
be careful when converting from iso-8859-1 to utf-8.
even if you explicitly specify the character encoding of a page as iso-8859-1(via headers and strict xml defs), windows 2000 will ignore that and interpret it as whatever character set it has natively installed.
for example, i wrote char #128 into a page, with char encoding iso-8859-1, and it displayed in internet explorer (& mozilla) as a euro symbol.
it should have displayed a box, denoting that char #128 is undefined in iso-8859-1. The problem was it was displaying in "Windows: western europe" (my native character set).
this led to confusion when i tried to convert this euro to UTF-8 via mb_convert_encoding()
IE displays UTF-8 correctly- and because PHP correctly converted #128 into a box in UTF-8, IE would show a box.
so all i saw was mb_convert_encoding() converting a euro symbol into a box. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on.
Another sample of recoding without MultiByte enabling.
(Russian koi->win, if input in win-encoding already, function recode() returns unchanged string)
<?php
// 0 - win
// 1 - koi
function detect_encoding($str) {
$win = 0;
$koi = 0;
for($i=0; $i<strlen($str); $i++) {
if( ord($str[$i]) >224 && ord($str[$i]) < 255) $win++;
if( ord($str[$i]) >192 && ord($str[$i]) < 223) $koi++;
}
if( $win < $koi ) {
return 1;
} else return 0;
}
// recodes koi to win
function koi_to_win($string) {
$kw = array(128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 254, 224, 225, 246, 228, 229, 244, 227, 245, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 255, 240, 241, 242, 243, 230, 226, 252, 251, 231, 248, 253, 249, 247, 250, 222, 192, 193, 214, 196, 197, 212, 195, 213, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 223, 208, 209, 210, 211, 198, 194, 220, 219, 199, 216, 221, 217, 215, 218);
$wk = array(128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 225, 226, 247, 231, 228, 229, 246, 250, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 230, 232, 227, 254, 251, 253, 255, 249, 248, 252, 224, 241, 193, 194, 215, 199, 196, 197, 214, 218, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 198, 200, 195, 222, 219, 221, 223, 217, 216, 220, 192, 209);
$end = strlen($string);
$pos = 0;
do {
$c = ord($string[$pos]);
if ($c>128) {
$string[$pos] = chr($kw[$c-128]);
}
} while (++$pos < $end);
return $string;
}
function recode($str) {
$enc = detect_encoding($str);
if ($enc==1) {
$str = koi_to_win($str);
}
return $str;
}
?>