MongoDB PHP UTF-8 problems

Question

Assume that I need to insert the following document:

{
    title: \'Péter\'
}

(note the é)

It gives me an error when I use the foll

Answer 1

As @gates said, all string data in BSON is encoded as UTF-8. MongoDB assumes this.

Another key point which neither answer addresses: PHP is not Unicode aware. As of 5.3, anyway. PHP 6 will supposedly be Unicode-aware. What this means is you have to know what encoding is used by your operating system by default and what encoding PHP is using.

Let's get back to your original question: "Is there some way to automate this process?" ... my suggestion is to make sure you are always using UTF-8 throughout your application. Configuration, input, data storage, presentation, everything. Then the "automated" part is that most of your PHP code will be simpler since it always assumes UTF-8. No conversions necessary. Heck, nobody said automation was cheap. :)

Here's kind of an aside. If you created a little PHP script to test that insert() code, figure out what encoding your file is, then convert to UTF-8 before inserting. For example, if you know the file is ISO-8859-1, try this:

$title = mb_convert_encoding("Péter", "UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1");
$db->collection->insert(array("title" => $title));

See also

• http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-unicode/
• http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html