Issue with PHP and UTF-8 Characters

Question

I've been working on a website recently (localhost environment). Today I made it online and I encountred a really wierd problem :

When ever I try to output UTF-8 characters (hebrew) from my database it works perfectly, but when I try to echo simple text (ex: echo "שלום";) I get question marks (not the ones with the black background).

I've tried to search for a solution but found none. I hope you guys can help me with this

Answer 1

Things to check:

1. Did you try telling the client browser what character set you're using: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> ( <meta charset="utf-8"> vs <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"> )

2. Is your file/editor set for UTF-8? Eclipse defaults to cp1252, common windows editors will default to ISO-8859-1 or UCS-2.

3. In your php.ini file, confirm default_charset = "UTF-8" (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.default-charset )

4. Force the content type in the HTTP transaction (via response header): header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); Be sure to include this before any content is flushed to the browser.

Answer 2

Your encoding is wrong in your code files. Your editor saved them wrong, and you probably did not bother to also send a HTTP header for "Content-type", and your localhost also did not, but your online server now does.

Change the encoding, and all will be well.

Answer 3

I had this problem recently. Use this code to solve it:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">