How To Fix Unicode Character Issues On iTunes Feed

Question

I am trying to pull applications from the Apple App Store using their authorised flat feed. However, I am having a tough time dealing with the encoding issues. Here are some examples:

A Japanese app titled

ホームページ用和英辞典

is displayed as

ホームページ用å'Œè‹±è¾žå

Not just that, even commonly used special characters like '(apostrophe), “(quote) are displayed with characters like ’ and “.

Can someone please help me with how this issue can be sorted out?

Edited to Add: I am working on PHP

Answer 1

What character set is the feed provided in, and what character set are you declaring your document to be? It's pretty common for people starting out to be sending ISO-8859-1, while reading in a UTF-8 feed. You'll want those two to match for simplicity.

These two articles may also be of interest while dealing with these issues

• http://phpadvent.org/2009/character-sets-by-paul-reinheimer
• http://seancoates.com/blogs/tag/unicode

Answer 2

It looks like you are either not retaining the original character coding or you are outputting Unicode into a non Unicode coded stream.