CKEditor charset

Question

I updated my web app to use UTF-8 instead of ANSI.

I did the following measures to define charset:

mysql_set_charset("utf8"); // PHP
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> // HTML
utf8_general_ci // In MySQL

I also edited the CKEditor config to remove htmlentities because I need the correct character (i.e. é and not é) for MySQL fulltext search.

config.entities = false;
config.entities_latin = false;

In the database (phpMyAdmin view) and on normal text fields output (HTML, <input> or <textarea>), everything looks fine (I see é, not é, not é, yay).

However, CKEditor has some trouble with the encoding. See attached image for the same field taken from the database, displayed in a textarea, then in a textarea repalced by CKEditor:

This seems to be in the CKEditor JavaScript code (probably a fixed charset), but I can't find it in the config. Again, since the é displays correctly in normal HTML (real UTF-8 é, not é nor é), I'm quite sure it's not the PHP/MySQL query that's wrong (but I might be mistaken).

EDIT: This seems like a symptom of applying htmlentities, which by default is encoded in Latin-1, on UTF-8 text. There is either a possibility of using htmlspecialchars or to specify the charset ("utf-8"), but I don't know where to modify that in CKEditor.

Answer 1

You can also use in your database connection: $connection->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); And remember to set db, and/or table Collation to utf8... I prefer utf8_general_ci

Answer 2

It was my approach that was wrong, not CKEditor's. Was looking in the wrong file and missed the UTF-8 encoding on a htmlspecialchars.

Answer 3

This thread seems bit dated but answering it to help anyone looking for a response.

To allow CKEditor to process the character é as é and not &eacute; set the config for entities_latin to false, as below:

config.entities_latin = false;

Or, you may just want to set following options to false:

config.entities = false;
config.basicEntities = false;