UTF-8 all the way through

Question

I'm setting up a new server and want to support UTF-8 fully in my web application. I have tried this in the past on existing servers and always seem to end up having to fall back to ISO-8859-1.

Where exactly do I need to set the encoding/charsets? I'm aware that I need to configure Apache, MySQL, and PHP to do this — is there some standard checklist I can follow, or perhaps troubleshoot where the mismatches occur?

This is for a new Linux server, running MySQL 5, PHP, 5 and Apache 2.

Answer 1

Unicode support in PHP is still a huge mess. While it's capable of converting an ISO8859 string (which it uses internally) to utf8, it lacks the capability to work with unicode strings natively, which means all the string processing functions will mangle and corrupt your strings. So you have to either use a separate library for proper utf8 support, or rewrite all the string handling functions yourself.

The easy part is just specifying the charset in HTTP headers and in the database and such, but none of that matters if your PHP code doesn't output valid UTF8. That's the hard part, and PHP gives you virtually no help there. (I think PHP6 is supposed to fix the worst of this, but that's still a while away)

Answer 2

I found an issue with someone using PDO and the answer was to use this for the PDO connection string:

$pdo = new PDO(
    'mysql:host=mysql.example.com;dbname=example_db',
    "username",
    "password",
    array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));

The site I took this from is down, but I was able to get it using the Google cache, luckily.

Answer 3

Data Storage:

• Specify the utf8mb4 character set on all tables and text columns in your database. This makes MySQL physically store and retrieve values encoded natively in UTF-8. Note that MySQL will implicitly use utf8mb4 encoding if a utf8mb4_* collation is specified (without any explicit character set).

• In older versions of MySQL (< 5.5.3), you'll unfortunately be forced to use simply utf8, which only supports a subset of Unicode characters. I wish I were kidding.

Data Access:

• In your application code (e.g. PHP), in whatever DB access method you use, you'll need to set the connection charset to utf8mb4. This way, MySQL does no conversion from its native UTF-8 when it hands data off to your application and vice versa.

• Some drivers provide their own mechanism for configuring the connection character set, which both updates its own internal state and informs MySQL of the encoding to be used on the connection—this is usually the preferred approach. In PHP:

  • If you're using the PDO abstraction layer with PHP ≥ 5.3.6, you can specify charset in the DSN:

    $dbh = new PDO('mysql:charset=utf8mb4');
    

  • If you're using mysqli, you can call set_charset():

    $mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4');       // object oriented style
    mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8mb4');  // procedural style
    

  • If you're stuck with plain mysql but happen to be running PHP ≥ 5.2.3, you can call mysql_set_charset.

• If the driver does not provide its own mechanism for setting the connection character set, you may have to issue a query to tell MySQL how your application expects data on the connection to be encoded: SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'.

• The same consideration regarding utf8mb4/utf8 applies as above.

Output:

• If your application transmits text to other systems, they will also need to be informed of the character encoding. With web applications, the browser must be informed of the encoding in which data is sent (through HTTP response headers or HTML metadata).

• In PHP, you can use the default_charset php.ini option, or manually issue the Content-Type MIME header yourself, which is just more work but has the same effect.

• When encoding the output using json_encode(), add JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE as a second parameter.

Input:

• Unfortunately, you should verify every received string as being valid UTF-8 before you try to store it or use it anywhere. PHP's mb_check_encoding() does the trick, but you have to use it religiously. There's really no way around this, as malicious clients can submit data in whatever encoding they want, and I haven't found a trick to get PHP to do this for you reliably.

• From my reading of the current HTML spec, the following sub-bullets are not necessary or even valid anymore for modern HTML. My understanding is that browsers will work with and submit data in the character set specified for the document. However, if you're targeting older versions of HTML (XHTML, HTML4, etc.), these points may still be useful:

  • For HTML before HTML5 only: you want all data sent to you by browsers to be in UTF-8. Unfortunately, if you go by the the only way to reliably do this is add the accept-charset attribute to all your <form> tags: <form ... accept-charset="UTF-8">.
  • For HTML before HTML5 only: note that the W3C HTML spec says that clients "should" default to sending forms back to the server in whatever charset the server served, but this is apparently only a recommendation, hence the need for being explicit on every single <form> tag.

Other Code Considerations:

• Obviously enough, all files you'll be serving (PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc.) should be encoded in valid UTF-8.

• You need to make sure that every time you process a UTF-8 string, you do so safely. This is, unfortunately, the hard part. You'll probably want to make extensive use of PHP's mbstring extension.

• PHP's built-in string operations are not by default UTF-8 safe. There are some things you can safely do with normal PHP string operations (like concatenation), but for most things you should use the equivalent mbstring function.

• To know what you're doing (read: not mess it up), you really need to know UTF-8 and how it works on the lowest possible level. Check out any of the links from utf8.com for some good resources to learn everything you need to know.

Answer 4

I have just went through the same issue and found a good solution at PHP manuals.

I changed all my file encoding to UTF8 then the default encoding on my connection. This solved all the problems.

if (!$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")) {
    printf("Error loading character set utf8: %s\n", $mysqli->error);
} else {
   printf("Current character set: %s\n", $mysqli->character_set_name());
}

View Source

Answer 5

If you want MySQL server to decide character set, and not PHP as a client (old behaviour; preferred, in my opinion), try adding skip-character-set-client-handshake to your my.cnf, under [mysqld], and restart mysql.

This may cause troubles in case you're using anything other than UTF8.

Answer 6

The top answer is excellent. Here is what I had to on a regular debian/php/mysql setup:

// storage
// debian. apparently already utf-8

// retrieval
// the mysql database was stored in utf-8, 
// but apparently php was requesting iso. this worked: 
// ***notice "utf8", without dash, this is a mysql encoding***
mysql_set_charset('utf8');

// delivery
// php.ini did not have a default charset, 
// (it was commented out, shared host) and
// no http encoding was specified in the apache headers.
// this made apache send out a utf-8 header
// (and perhaps made php actually send out utf-8)
// ***notice "utf-8", with dash, this is a php encoding***
ini_set('default_charset','utf-8');

// submission
// this worked in all major browsers once apache
// was sending out the utf-8 header. i didnt add
// the accept-charset attribute.

// processing
// changed a few commands in php, like substr,
// to mb_substr

that was all !