cannot read accented name in array with php

Question

I want to do a check if a name already exists in an array. I have an issue with a name which contains accented chars. Below is the code is use and when filling in the (french) name Charlène Rodriês and the (german) name Jürgen Günter; it outputs: NOT exists.

How can i catch these names which contain accented characters?

<?php
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
    if (isset($_POST['bioname'])) {
        $bioname = trim(htmlentities($_POST['bioname']));
        
        $array = array('John Doe','Bill Cleve','Charlène Rodriês','мария преснякова','Jürgen Günter');
        
        if (in_array($bioname_raw, $array)) { // if bioname already exists
            echo '<div">'.$bioname.' ALREADY exists!</div>';

        }
        else {
            echo '<div">'.$bioname.' NOT exists!</div>';
        }   
    }
}
?>
<form action="<?php $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="POST">    
    <input class="form-control" name="bioname" type="text" placeholder="AUTHORNAME">    
    <button type="submit" id="cf-submit" name="submit" class="btn btn-primary w-100">POST</button>                                  
</form>

Try with `urldecode` https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.urldecode.php — Slava Rozhnev, Sep 20 '20 at 10:38

M. Eriksson · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-20T10:36:48.050

You're comparing apples and oranges.

When you do htmlentities('Charlène Rodriês'), it changes the string and will encode it into: Charlène Rodriês, which obviously won't match Charlène Rodriês in your in_array().

So remove the htmlentities() when you get the value from the $_POST-variable:

$bioname = trim($_POST['bioname']);

and only use that function before you output the data:

 echo '<div">'. htmlentities($bioname).' ALREADY exists!</div>';

As a general rule of thumb, don't encode data on input. Only encode data when you use it since different use cases requires different types of encoding.

cannot read accented name in array with php

1 Answers1