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?
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
It sounds like that if you request faq.html the webserver signals your browser that the file is in UTF-8 encoding.
Check that with your browser which encoding is announced and used, please see the documentation of your browser how to do that. Every browser has this, most often accessible via the menu (to specify your preference which website's encoding should be used) and to see what the server returned, you often find this in page properties.
Then it sounds like that if you request faq.php the webserver singals your browser that the file is in some other encoding. Probably no charset/encoding is given as per default PHP configuration setting. As it's a PHP file you can most often solve this by changing the PHP configuration default_charsetDocs directive:
default_charset = "UTF-8"
Locate your php.ini on the host and edit it accordingly.
If you don't have the php.ini available, you can change this by code as well by using the ini_setDocs function:
ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
Take care that you change this very early in your script because PHP needs to be able to send out headers to have this working, and headers can't be set any longer if they have already been send.
Manually sending the Content-Type header-line does work, too:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
Additionally it's good practice that all the HTML pages you output have this header as well in their HTML <head> section:
<html>
<head>
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
...
Hope this is helpful.
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');
I solve my issue by using utf8_encode();
$str = "kamé";
echo utf8_encode($str);
Hope this help someone.
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!
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.
Adding the following line in the head tag fixed my issue.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Source: Stackoverflow.com