Catalan characters à and è don't work with php imagestringup - how to decode them?

Question

When I call the below code with $text with Spanish I got correct text with image but When I call the same code with $text with Catalan I don't get correct text in the image. I understand that Spanish Special chars á and é are working but Catalan characters à and è are not working.

Can you please help me to correct this problem.

 <?php
    //$text = "Sándalo Ayurvédicos"; // Text in Spanish 
    $text = "Sàndal Ayurvèdics";  // Text in Catalan
    //$text = utf8_encode($text);
    //$text = utf8_decode($text);
    $img = "sample";
    $im = imagecreatetruecolor(25, 350);
    $black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
    imagecolortransparent($im, $black);
    $textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 73, 100, 23);
    imagestringup($im, 3, 10, 340, $text,$textcolor);
    imagepng($im, $img.'.png');
    imagedestroy($im);
    $imagename = $img.'.png';
    print '<img src="'.$imagename.'"></img>';
    ?>

I see `utf8_encode()` commented out. That makes me suspect that you don't have the faintest idea of what source your encoding is, am I right? — Álvaro González, Apr 18 '13 at 09:49
Sorry I tried it with No affect if I add comment or uncomment it — App tester, Apr 18 '13 at 09:52
Does your text editor have a status bar or file properties dialogue where you can read something like `ANSI`, `UTF-8` or similar? — Álvaro González, Apr 18 '13 at 09:56
I changed php file to utf 8. and called $text = utf8_decode($text); it works with only Spanish not with Catalan. Please check these are real catalan chars à and è ? — App tester, Apr 18 '13 at 10:05
It's a common error to assume that `utf8_decode()` is some sort of magic function that fixes encoding issues automatically. Please read [its manual page](http://php.net/utf8_code) and learn what it actually does. — Álvaro González, Apr 18 '13 at 10:20
possible duplicate of [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — Álvaro González, Apr 18 '13 at 10:21
@ÁlvaroG.Vicario not really, it's really just about using TtfText and not imagestringup which wouldn't gain anything from UTF-8 all the way. — Esailija, Apr 18 '13 at 11:33

Esailija · Answer 1 · 2013-04-18T11:28:19.053

The $string parameter is extremely ambiguous in PHP because strings in PHP don't carry the encoding with them and PHP doesn't unify the encoding of strings at all. In other words, they are byte arrays and not like Strings are usually in high level languages where all strings have internal unified unicode encoding and such parameter wouldn't be ambiguous.

I read from comments that the string must be in ISO-8859-2, which only supports á but not à.

You can use imagettftext that is documented to take the string in UTF-8 encoding, which is good because at least all characters can be drawn. But it requires a TrueType font, I am using Arial Unicode here:

<?php
header("Content-Type: image/png");


$text = "汉语/漢語"; //My PHP is already saved as UTF-8 in text editor - no conversion necessary

$im = imagecreatetruecolor(25, 350);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
imagecolortransparent($im, $black);
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 73, 100, 23);

            //270 is the angle, from up-to-bottom
imageTtfText( $im, 12, 270, 10, 10, $textcolor, "./arial_unicode.ttf", $text );
        //12 is font size
//Camel-cased because imagettftext just looks horrible and php is case-insensitive

imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

Here's the image that the above code generates:

+1 I've just learnt from you yet another stupid PHP design decision: a GD function that only accepts latin2... — Álvaro González, Apr 18 '13 at 11:43
@ÁlvaroG.Vicario yeah that choice is completely arbitrary even if you don't know about Unicode. Maybe the author was Eastern European? Kinda like `T_PAAMAYIM_NEKDOTAYIM`... seriously :'( — Esailija, Apr 18 '13 at 11:46

Catalan characters à and è don't work with php imagestringup - how to decode them?

1 Answers1