PHP convert foreign characters with accents

Question

Hi I\'m trying to compare some text to the text in a database.. in the database any text with an accent is encoded like in html (ie. é) when I compare the databas

Answer 1

I'm working on french site, and I also had same problem. This is the function that I use.

function convert_accent($string)
{
    return htmlspecialchars_decode(htmlentities(utf8_decode($string)));
}

What it does it decodes your string to utf8, than converts everything HTML entities. even tags. But we want to convert tags back to normal, than htmlspecialchars_decode will convert them back. So in the end you will get a string with converted accents without touching tags. You can use pass through this function your email content before sending it to recipent.

Another issue you might face is that, sometimes with this function the content from database converts to ? . In this case you should do this before running your query:

mysql_query("SET NAMES `utf8`");

But you might need to do it, it depends on encoding in your table. I hope it helps.