Full utf-8 compliance for a php web app?

Question

I'm writing a small web app that will receive and parse tab-delimited text files from users. Those files will either be uploaded via a textarea or a multipart/form-data form. Those files will be in a variety of charsets, including Asian and the like. In consequence I am trying to use utf-8 throughout the app.

The site is entirely (as far as I know) in UTF-8:

Each php file is saved in utf-8 encoding;
I have added default_charset = "utf-8" in my php.ini file;

The HTML header contains the required utf-8 mentions:

header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');
...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

The textarea forms contain the accept-charset="UTF-8" tag.
The db is collated in utf-8;
Each connection to the db includes the option 1002 => 'SET NAMES utf8'.

Now, I just discovered that I needed to set mb_regex_encoding to utf-8 manually for one of my parsing function to work (I use mb_split() to identify & replace tabs and new lines). So ...

What else do I need to do to make sure my site is once and for all utf-8 throughout? In particular, are there any other encoding function I should set, such as mb_internal_encoding(), and if so where in the code should I do that (e.g., at the start of the index.php file?

@Vague - yes, it mentions neither `mb_regex_encoding` nor `mb_internal_encoding`. — JDelage, Feb 23 '12 at 22:14
@JDelage: PCRE functions do with UTF-8 as well, just FYI. And don't use `SET NAMES utf8`, see here: http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.set-charset.php — hakre, Feb 23 '12 at 22:24
@hakre - Is that something I can use with PDO? My entire db interactions are PDO based. — JDelage, Feb 24 '12 at 03:19
@JDelage: Please see [PHP PDO: charset, set names?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/4361459/367456) — hakre, Feb 24 '12 at 13:27
@hakre - Thanks, good resource, unfortunately I use v.5.3.0, and this solution only works for version >=5.3.6. — JDelage, Feb 24 '12 at 23:52

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

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I can think of two more things;

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

...as early as possible in the PHP script, and

mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8');

...to set the connection charset, if you're using MySql. For PDO, you can specify it with the connection string:

"mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db;charset=utf8"

edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

Community

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answered Feb 23 '12 at 22:18

jgivoni

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Reg. `mb_internal_encoding()`, should I do that before or after `session_start()`? – JDelage Feb 23 '12 at 22:24
@JDelage: `mb_...` is not related to `session_start` if you don't use serialized objects that use `mb_...` function while deserializing. – hakre Feb 23 '12 at 22:28
You should set the internal encoding for multibyte string manipulation functions **before** you try to manipulate any multibyte strings. I don't think session_start() implies any string manipulation, so I wouldn't use that as a cursor. – jgivoni Feb 23 '12 at 22:29
I'm only using that as the first thing that is read by the script. My code starts with `require_once(objects in session);` and then `session_start()`. – JDelage Feb 23 '12 at 22:36
Wow, both question and 'my' answer have been edited so much here that I hardly recognize them anymore... – jgivoni Feb 24 '12 at 22:39

Full utf-8 compliance for a php web app?

1 Answers1