How to properly display Chinese characters in PHP?

Question

I have these Chinese characters:

汉字/漢字\'\'test

If I do

echo utf8_encode($chinesevar);

it displays

<

Answer 1

Simple:

1. save your source code in UTF-8

2. output an HTTP header to specify to your browser that it should interpret the page using UTF-8:

   header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
   

Done.

utf8_encode is for converting Latin-1 encoded strings to UTF-8. You don't need it.

For more details, see Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App.