How to display special characters in PHP

Question

I've seen this asked several times, but not with a good resolution. I have the following string:

$string = "<p>Résumé</p>";

I want to print or echo the string, but the output will return R�sum�. So I try htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() which outputs Résumé and the browser renders Résumé. I want it, obviously, to render this:

Résumé

And I'm using UTF-8:

header("Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

What am I missing here? Why do echo and print output a � for any special character? To clarify, the string is actually an entire HTML file stored in a database. The real-world application is not just that one small line.

no, no the header, the enconding of the text file. ihad a similar problem, and it turned out it was because the file encoding was latin-1, and i was setting the header to UTF-8 — Jarry, Oct 02 '12 at 22:15
You'll have to be more specific. I'm not sure what you mean by the text file. The file itself is PHP. I'm sending that header to the browser. — Phil Tune, Oct 02 '12 at 22:20

score 50 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

After much banging-head-on-table, I have a bit better understanding of the issue that I wanted to post for anyone else who may have had this issue.

While the UTF-8 character set will display special characters on the client, the server, on the other hand, may not be so accomodating and would print special characters such as à and è as � and �.

To make sure your server will print them correctly, use the ISO-8859-1 charset:

<?php
    /*Just for your server-side code*/
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8"><!-- Your HTML file can still use UTF-8-->
        <title>Untitled Document</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <?= "àè" ?>
    </body>
</html>

This will print correctly: àè

Edit (4 years later):

I have a little better understanding now. The reason this works is that the client (browser) is being told, through the response header(), to expect an ISO-8859-1 text/html file. (As others have mentioned, you can also do this by updating your .ini or .htaccess files.) Then, once the browser begins to parse that given file into the DOM, the output will obey any <meta charset=""> rule but keep your ISO characters intact.

This 2009 article also summarizes this issue nicely: http://blog.salientdigital.com/2009/06/06/special-characters-showing-up-as-a-question-mark-inside-of-a-black-diamond/. I think particularly my issue may be in using WAMPServer's PHP.ini default encoding. Which is probably why many people reading this and other posts don't understand what we're talking about. I haven't a clue when it comes to encoding arguments, and truthfully, I and you don't want to have to deal with it when our efforts are being put towards just making cool stuff. — Phil Tune, Oct 13 '12 at 18:19
`charset=ISO-8859-1'` worked for me. Thanks a lot :-). Upvoted — Sudharshan Nair, Mar 12 '19 at 06:40

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 07 '18 at 08:03

5

In PHP there is a pretty good function utf8_encode() to solve this issue.

echo utf8_encode("Résumé");

//will output Résumé instead of R�sum�

Check the official PHP page.

answered May 07 '18 at 08:03

Vikas Kandari

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Justin Wood · Answer 3 · 2012-10-02T22:21:56.840

4

You can have a mix of PHP and HTML in your PHP files... just do something like this...

<?php
$string = htmlentities("Résumé");
?>

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p><?= $string ?></p>
</body>
</html>

That should output Résumé just how you want it to.

If you don't have short tags enabled, replace the <?= $string ?> with <?php echo $string; ?>

edited Oct 02 '12 at 22:21

answered Oct 02 '12 at 22:14

Justin Wood

9,941
2
33
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2

What question is this answer for? – Vultour Oct 02 '12 at 22:17
This solution is great for PHP strings, but when I use it my special characters printed with HTML and not coming from PHP show wrong... Any solution? – samyb8 Sep 22 '14 at 08:10

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 02 '12 at 22:11

1

So I try htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() which outputs Résumé and the browser renders Résumé.

If you've got it working where it displays Résumé with  tags around it, then just don't convert the paragraph, only your string. Then the paragraph will be rendered as HTML and your string will be displayed within.

answered Oct 02 '12 at 22:11

NightHawk

3,633
8
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Thank you, but how might one keep from converting the <> characters? The string I would be passing is actually an entire html page. – Phil Tune Oct 02 '12 at 22:15
1

Take a look at this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1364933/htmlentities-in-php-but-preserving-html-tags – NightHawk Oct 02 '12 at 22:19
+1 @NightHawk, that post helped. It seems like there is probably a predefined PHP function out there for this, but that works beautifully. Thanks! – Phil Tune Oct 02 '12 at 22:29
So I'm still having issues with this é character. When I `UPDATE` my database it turns out as Ã©. Can't figure out why it's doing that or how to fix it. – Phil Tune Oct 08 '12 at 01:44

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 26 '13 at 08:57

0

$str = "Is your name O\'vins?";

// Outputs: Is your name O'vins? echo stripslashes($str);

answered Apr 26 '13 at 08:57

Vincy Oommen

75
1
2

score 0 · Answer 6 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

0

This works for me:

Create/edit .htaccess file with these lines:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
AddCharset UTF-8 .php

If you prefer create/edit php.ini:

default_charset = "utf-8"

Sources:

edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

Community

1
1

answered Dec 27 '15 at 06:55

quantme

3,609
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score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Sep 07 '16 at 13:29

Try This

Input:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<?php
$str = "This is some <b>bold</b> text.";
echo htmlspecialchars($str);
?>

<p>Converting &lt; and &gt; into entities are often used to prevent browsers from using it as an HTML element. <br />This can be especially useful to prevent code from running when users have access to display input on your homepage.</p>

</body>
</html>

Output:

This is some <b>bold</b> text.

Converting < and > into entities are often used to prevent browsers from using it as an HTML element. This can be especially useful to prevent code from running when users have access to display input on your homepage.

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Aug 31 '17 at 19:09

0

This works for me. Try this one before the start of HTML. I hope it will also work for you.

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-15'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en-US">
<head>

answered Aug 31 '17 at 19:09

Hafiz Ameer Hamza

462
1
4
14

score 0 · Answer 9 · edited Jun 26 '18 at 21:04

0

The following worked for me when having a similar issue lately:

$str = iconv('iso-8859-15', 'utf-8', $str);

edited Jun 26 '18 at 21:04

Paul Roub

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answered Jun 26 '18 at 21:00

seantunwin

1,698
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score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Dec 03 '20 at 21:38

One of the best ways to do this is, change Collation in my SQL database.

step 1: Go to the Mysql database

step 2: Select the Text-based Row you want to get displayed (Eg., post or comments)

step 3: edit the row and select collation as below.

utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Make sure to change the collation of text rows whichever you want to display the special characters.

Sometimes htmlspecialchars_decode() or any other entity() doesn't convert your special chars to normal. So, the above method will definitely help.

How to display special characters in PHP

10 Answers10

Edit (4 years later):

Linked