In PHP, when I use fwrite, I don't get the correct character set

Question

Here is my code:

<?php
  header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
  header("Content-Type: application/x-javascript; charset=UTF-8");

  $fName = "demo.txt";
  $str   = "óé";
  fid   = fopen($fName, 'wb') or die("can't open file"); // Open file

  fwrite($fid, $str); // Write to file
  fclose($fid);         // Close file
?>

To the screen, the output is:

óéü

When I open the file I get:

óéü

I am trying to save large amounts of data using fwrite, but the characters are not encoding correctly at the point of file save.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

fwrite stores strings binary. It does not do any charset conversion. It's more likely that your PHP script is in a wrong charset, and thus the original "óéü" string. Show us the bin2hex($str) and bin2hex(file_get_contents('demo.txt')) if you can't debug it yourself.

There are some generic options to solve such problems:

• Using utf8_encode($str) before saving.
• Writing the UTF-8 BOM into the output file first fwrite($f, "\\xEF\\xBB\\xBF")
• correct conversion with iconv()
• or adapting the php script itself with recode L1..UTF8 script.php

Answer 2

what program are you using to "open" the file? that program could be the problem.

Answer 3

First, insert the utf_encode inside the fwrite, like this:

<?php

$fName = "demo.txt";
$str   = "óé";
fid   = fopen($fName, 'wb') or die("can't open file"); // Open file

fwrite($fid, utf_encode($str)); // Write to file
fclose($fid);         // Close file
?> 

Next, remember to save your PHP script with UTF-8 without BOM encoding. Use any advanced code editor like Notepad++ to do this.