Preparing PHP application to use with UTF-8

Question

UTF-8 is de facto standard for web applications now, but PHP this is not a default encoding for PHP (until 6.0). Most of the server is set up for the ISO-8859-1 encoding by

Answer 1

Basically I do three things to work correctly with czech language:

1) define locale in PHP:

setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "cs_CZ");
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "cs_CZ");

so you would use something like:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.utf8");
setlocale(LC_ALL, "nl_NL.utf8");

based on language which is currently switched to.

2) define charset for the database:

mysql_query("set names latin2 collate latin2_czech_cs");

3) define the charset of PHP/HTML code:

I don't use any .htaccess setting. You can modify this for your case, in locale use something like en_US.utf8 (based on language currently which is currently switched to), in charset use utf-8 instead of latin2/iso-8859-2 and it should work well.