Setting PHP default encoding to utf-8?

Question

In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the char encoding of outgoing data to utf-8 it is necessary to edit the default_encoding configuration to utf-8.

However, I cannot find this configuration in php.ini. Should I simply add a line that would say default_encoding = "utf-8"?

I do have a ;default_charset = "iso-8859-1" . As you can see (;), right now it is not activated. Should I remove the semi-colon and set it to "utf-8"? Does that take care of the default encoding?

I also found other encoding directives that I don't know what to do about:

[iconv]
;iconv.input_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.internal_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.output_encoding = ISO-8859-1
...
; http://php.net/exif.encode-unicode
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
...
;mssql.charset = "ISO-8859-1"
...
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15

Is there any reason why I shouldn't simply replace them all with utf-8?

Answer 1

Modify the line

;default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

to read

default_charset = "utf-8"

About the other options, do not touch them. Avoid default settings, always explicitly set the encoding of in everything you do

• database connections,
• reading and writing files,
• converting with iconv.

Also, beware of the encoding in which your PHP files are saved, make sure that they are in UTF-8, especially if they contain strings to be displayed or compared.

Answer 2

At htaccess level (.htaccess file) the php directive should be php_value default_charset UTF-8

Answer 3

I had a problem on my mysql query that it would not recognize some latin acentuation, so the query would fail. I thought it could be the php file and so on, till i found out that using pdo to call the mysql i had to add the charset. The weird thing is that the previous server i used worked fine!

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=retirodo_main;charset=utf8';
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ^^^^^^^^^^^^

Answer 4

changing from *default_charset = "utf-8"* to *default_charset = "iso-8859-1"* works for me ( i use Apache web server and Linux OS). for some reasons when i use utf-8, some characters don't render well. They either change to some square sign or question mark depending on the web browser used.

Answer 5

To resolve I changed "UTF-8" to "UTF-8" (without the dash), solving the problem instead.

CentOS

Izaias Moura

Answer 6

You should set your default_charset to UTF-8:

default_charset = "utf-8"

(PHP Cookbook may have a typo in it if they ask you to change the default_encoding — I've never heard of it.)

You'll also want to make sure that your webserver is set to output UTF-8 if you're going to outputting UTF-8 encoded characters. In Apache this can be set by in the httpd.conf file:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

As for modifying the iconv, exif, and mssql encoding settings, you probably don't need to set these (your settings have these commented out anyhow) but it's a good idea to change them all to UTF-8 anyhow.