PHP File Get Contents & String Encoding

Question

Retrieved the contents of a css file: (http://gizmodo.com/assets/stylesheets/app-ecbc6044c59319aab4c2a1e31380ef56.css)

Detected the encoding with mb_detect_encoding... says UTF-8.

Viewed the page in a browser, looks fine (readable), and declares @charset "UTF-8";

Tried to output the string, got garbage. Tried to save it to a file, got garbage.

Tried to convert the encoding to ASCII, ISO-8859-1, and HTML-ENTITIES. No luck.

Any ideas here how to determine why this string is garbage, and how to fix it?

im with you up to this line *"Tried to output the string in terminal, got garbage"* then i'm not sure what your doing — , Jul 17 '13 at 20:50
how did you retrieve the contents of the fiie? the code your using would probably make this clearer — , Jul 17 '13 at 20:52
tried both `file_get_contents` and `curl` ... tried on both my local comp and remote server, same result, so i know it's not my config — Matisse VerDuyn, Jul 17 '13 at 20:52
Hint: UTF-8 equals Latin1 equals ASCII for files containing only ASCII characters. It will never mess up in its entirety because of a charset mismatch. So you can rule out encodings as a problem source. — deceze, Jul 17 '13 at 21:02

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 17 '13 at 20:56

5

The Content-Encoding of the page you're trying to fetch is gzip. You'll need to uncompress it before using it.

Notice the Content-Encoding

I just tried the following and it worked fine:

echo gzdecode(file_get_contents($your_url));

answered Jul 17 '13 at 20:56

Mr. Llama

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Darn, how'd I miss that! Anyway, you answered first, but @GarrettCosco looks like he's getting started here building rep. Wish I could accept both answers! – Matisse VerDuyn Jul 17 '13 at 21:02
2

His answer is more "correct" whereas mine is more of a hack/demo. I'd pick his over mine too. – Mr. Llama Jul 17 '13 at 21:03

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 17 '13 at 20:57

$url = 'http://gizmodo.com/assets/stylesheets/app-ecbc6044c59319aab4c2a1e31380ef56.css';

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_ENCODING , "gzip");
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $data;

Important line is

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_ENCODING , "gzip");

PHP File Get Contents & String Encoding

2 Answers2

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