Character Encoding with file_get_contents

Question

I'm trying to get a json file with file_get_contents and it works fine, the only problem is some of the data returns with special characters instead of their actual data. ie '...' becomes 'â€¦'

I can fix this by outputting the data wrapped in htmlentities tags but I'd rather not do that and instead have the encoding fixed.

I've tried a few things to send headers but still I get the problem.

see this link it is helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19758954/get-data-from-json-file-with-php — Mohammad Alabed, May 18 '14 at 09:11

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

This simply means that you are outputting perfectly fine UTF-8 to the browser, but the browser is interpreting it as Latin-1 encoded instead. You need to correctly tell the browser that it should deal with the content as UTF-8 by setting appropriate headers:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

If that doesn't work, inspect the raw response including headers in the browser to see whether the headers are actually being set. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/8028987/476.
Also see Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App.

Character Encoding with file_get_contents

1 Answers1