Topic: Text with accents garbled after using includ

[magarlick]

Hi all.

I have an odd problem with accented letters becoming garbled. Consider this snippet (I have the charset set to UTF-8 in the meta content of this document):
<?php
$foo = 'étoile';
echo $foo;
?>
The above works fine. The text is printed with the accent intact. But now look at this. First, a modification to the above (again, same charset):

Code: [Select]

<?php 
include 'set_variable.php';
echo $foo;
?>
And this is what's in set_variable.php:

Code: [Select]

<?php
$foo = '&#233;toile';
?>
If I do it like this, then the accented e in the variable $foo is garbled. A lozenge with a question mark. I have no idea why. I cannot pass any strings with accented characters in them. They all come out garbled.

I looked in the php.ini file and set default_charset = "utf-8". Same. So I cut it out completely. Same. So I set default_charset = "iso-8859-1". Still garbled but not a lozenge this time.

I looked in the httpd.conf and added this:

#AddCharset UTF-8 .utf8
#AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Same. The problem just will not go away.

Does anybody have any idea how to fix this?

Thanks for any input.

Mark


I use Vista Home Premium, PHP 5.2.9-2, Apache 2.2.11.

note: use can use [code] tags

[celsoendo]

Maybe your set_variable.php file is saved with incorrect encoding (different from the encoding of the main file).

[magarlick]

Thank you, celsoendo.

How do I set the encoding then when saving a php file? I use Dreamweaver CS3. I have not actively set any encoding for my PHP files, except those that have an HTML header in them. So I do not see why some would have one encoding, and others would have another.

Cheers.

M.

[celsoendo]

Hi.

I don't know how to config dreamweaver cause I never used it, but here is the result of my tests:

set_variable.php

<?php
$foo = 'étoile';
$foo2 = '&#233;toile';
?>

main.php

Code: [Select]

<?php
include 'set_variable.php';

echo $foo . '<br />';
echo $foo2 . '<br />';
?>

Ok. The code above printed out $foo with wrong characters and $foo2 with accents.

Changed main.php to:

Code: [Select]

<?php
include 'set_variable.php';

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

echo $foo . '<br />';
echo $foo2 . '<br />';
?>

And it worked with $foo and $foo2.

Cheers

[magarlick]

Thanks again for replying.

Yes I tried including that header statement before but it had no effect.

In fact I have solved the problem: the included file was corrupt, although it looked perfectly normal. I created a blank php file, copied the contents of the old include_variable.php into it, then saved as include_variable.php, overwriting the original file. It worked right away.

Who knows why these things are necessary!

I appreciate your help.

Mark.

[celsoendo]

Hi!

I think these strange things is Dreamweaver's errors! Just an opinion, cause I really hate Dreamweaver.... lol!

You should use a PHP IDE for php programming and forget Dreamweaver...

Topic resolved!