PUBLIC MARKS with tags dev & utf-8

Dealing with characters outside the ASCII range on the web is tough, since text needs to move through so many places without being mangled, from user input, through JavaScript, into and out of PHP and string manipulation functions, into and out of db

Some would say PHP has little or no Unicode support, and they'd be right. But I refer you back to the first item on our absolute minimum list. It's all just integers, and PHP has plenty of support for integers, so we can work around this problem.

This page is going to assume you’ve done a little reading and absorbed some paranioa about the issue of character sets and character encoding in web applications. If you haven’t, try here; “When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.” “Darn near impossible” is perhaps too extreme but, certainly in PHP, if you simply “accept the defaults” you probably will end up with all kinds of strange characters and question marks the moment anyone outside the US or Western Europe submits some content to your site This page won’t rehash existing discussions suffice to say you should be thinking in terms of Unicode, the grand unified solution to all character issues and, in particular, UTF-8, a specific encoding of Unicode and the best solution for PHP applications.

This page is intended as a reference for functionality PHP provides which can either help with handling UTF-8 or should be regarded as a risk when used in conjunction with UTF-8 encoded strings. Further information can be found on the i18n and charsets pages.