PHP file_exists and special characters like Å Ø Æ on a Linux box

Question

file_exists("file_å.txt");

Returns false while file is there. Is there any what to make *file_exists* to see the files with this kind of names?

Thanks.

possible duplicate of [special characters in "file_exists" problem (php)](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2685718/special-characters-in-file-exists-problem-php) — Treffynnon, May 24 '12 at 13:50
Not duplicate. That topic was related to windows-based box. But thanks for the link! — Aleksandr Makov, May 24 '12 at 13:56

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 01 '16 at 10:25

I've run in to this a couple of times when for example reading filenames from an Excel and looking up a given path on disk. The problem may be that "ä" is either it's specific unicode char (\u00e4) or its "combined diaresis" form (a\u0308) ie an "a" with two dots.

Best solution since php 5.3 is to use the Normalizer library. You may need sudo apt-get install php5-intl to get the class into your PHP. After that just

$normalizer = new \Normalizer();
$normalizer->normalize($val, \Normalizer::FORM_D)

Theres a few different forms for the second argument so you'll have to look up which one you need

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 24 '12 at 13:52

2

try

file_exists(mb_convert_encoding("file_å.txt", "UTF-8"));

assuming the text is not utf-8

answered May 24 '12 at 13:52

Venu

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score 2 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

2

Check this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2685818/190791

The solution for me was to convert to windows file format:

$winfilename= iconv('utf-8', 'cp1252', $utffilename);

edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

Community

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answered Dec 16 '12 at 13:35

Timothée HENRY

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This worked for me on file names which had a – symbol in them. Thanks! – Ev Haus Jun 22 '14 at 21:54

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered May 24 '12 at 13:52

1

Check which encoding your php script is in. Probably it's different from the file systems. (E.g. latin1 vs. utf-8)

answered May 24 '12 at 13:52

troelskn

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Yeah, the file is UTF-8. Not sure how to check what encoding is my hoister's filesystem. Will keep you updated. And thanks for the tip. – Aleksandr Makov May 24 '12 at 14:10
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Are you sure that your php file is in UTF8? (not the file_å.txt file) – periklis May 24 '12 at 14:16
iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', 'file_å.txt') provides proper file naming in the browser, but still, *file_eixsts* cannot check if it exists. – Aleksandr Makov May 24 '12 at 14:29
Strange - Maybe try to run `scandir` on the folder which contains your file and see how it comes back to you? – troelskn May 25 '12 at 05:45

PHP file_exists and special characters like Å Ø Æ on a Linux box

4 Answers4