utf-8 special characters not displaying

Question

I moved my website from my local test server to NameCheap shared hosting and now I'm running into a problem - some of the pages aren't displaying utf-8 special characters properly (showing question marks instead). All pages are utf-8 encoded, as are all database tables. The strange thing is, some pages display correctly and some don't, in a seemingly random pattern.

For instance, my index page is fine, but my profile page isn't. faq.html works fine, but when I rename it to faq.php it doesn't. And weirdest of all, I have a page with two JQuery tabs where one displays correctly and the other doesn't!

Can someone help me out with this?

Answer 1

The problem is because your file are not with the same encoding. First run the following command in all your files:

file -i filename.* 

In order to fix the problem you have to change all your files to uft-8. You can do it with the command iconv:

iconv -f fromcode -t tocode filename > newfilename

Example:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 index.html > fixed/index.html

After this you can run file -i fixedx/index.html and you will see that your file is now in uft-8

Answer 2

If you're using PHP and none of the above worked (as it was my case), you need to set the locale with utf-8 encoding.

Like this

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_CA.utf-8');

Answer 3

This is really annoying problem to fix but you can try these.

First of all, make sure the file is actually saved in UTF-8 format.

Then check that you have <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> in your HTML header.

You can also try calling header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); at the beginning of your PHP script or adding AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 to your .htaccess file.

Answer 4

set meta tag in head as

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> 

use the link http://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html to replace the symbols character you want.

then use str_replace like

    $find = array('“', '’', '…', '—', '–', '‘', 'é', 'Â', '•', 'Ëœ', 'â€'); // en dash
                        $replace = array('“', '’', '…', '—', '–', '‘', 'é', '', '•', '˜', '”');
$content = str_replace($find, $replace, $content);

Its the method i use and help alot. Thanks!

Answer 5

If all the other answers didn't work for you, try disabling HTTP input encoding translation.

This is a setting related to PHP extension mbstring. This was the problem in my case. This setting was enabled by default in my server.

Answer 6

I solve my issue by using utf8_encode();

$str = "kamé";

echo utf8_encode($str);

Hope this help someone.