PHP GD Imagecraft does not accept Spanish, Portuguese or Russian characters

Question

I use PHP GD Imagecraft to dynamically add text to animated gifs. And I allow users to input their own text strings to add text to animated gifs.

However, when I attempt to sumbit words in Spanish, a gif is not generated; when I attempt to submit words in Russian, the input is not accepted.

You can see an example here: https://clicktopick.org/vote/results/star_wars_ESP.php?cat=star_wars_ESP&email=YWpAYWxhbmphY29ic29uLm9yZw==&f_name=Alan&gender=male

Note the that placeholder text includes the word "línea" with an accent over the "í". So I know my page can render UTF-8 characters. However, if I attempt to submit the word "línea," to PHP GD Imagecraft, a gif is not generated.

I am storing terms in Spanish and Russian for display elswhere on my site, so I do not suspect encoding on the DB.

My page includes:

English:     # %         (generate error)
Spanish:     línea       (generates error)
Portuguese:  pontuações  (generates error)
Russian:     ДРАКОНИЙ    (input not recognized)

https://github.com/coldume/imagecraft

Answer 1

If you are retrieving and submitting data to/from a database, you should add this line directly after establishing the database connection in PHP:

$connect1->set_charset("utf8");

(where connect1 stands for your db connection)

Answer 2

I found the problem. It was a 64-bit encoding issue. Data in Russian would not pass to $_REQUEST with 64-bit encoding.