This section providing information on handling Chinese character string literals in UTF-8 encoding.
Since PHP strings takes 8-bit characters, we can use them as binary strings to store Chinese character strings in UTF-8 encoding.
In order to output Chinese characters to Web pages and display them correctly, you need to:
Enter Chinese characters in string literals in PHP scripts in UTF-8 encoding.
Handle Chinese character strings with normal string functions.
Output Chinese character strings to Web pages with the echo() or print() function.
Set charset=utf-8 in the HTML document header.
Make sure that PHP script files are saved in UTF-8 encoding.
Here is a simple test I did on my local system:
1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad.
2. In Notepad, enter the following PHP script:
<?php #String-UTF-8.php
# Copyright (c) 2007 by Dr. Herong Yang, http://www.herongyang.com/
#
$help_simplified = '这是一份非常间单的说明书…';
$help_tradition = '這是一份非常間單的說明書…';
print('<html>');
print('<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"'.
' content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>');
print('<body>');
print('<b>Chinese string in UTF-8 in PHP</b><br/>');
print($help_simplified.'<br/>');
print($help_tradition.'<br/>');
print('</body>');
print('</html>');
?>
Note that I used some Chinese character input add-on tools to enter Chinese characters.
3. Select menu File > Save as. Enter the file name as String-UTF-8.php. Select "UTF-8"
in the Encoding field and click the Save button.
4. Copy String-UTF-8.php to \local\apache\htdocs.
5. Now run Internet Explorer (IE) with http://localhost/String-UTF-8.php.
You should see Chinese characters displayed correctly:
This proves that the editor: notepad, the CGI program: PHP CGI, the Web server: Apache, and the Web browser: IE,
all worked correctly with Chinese characters in UTF-8 encoding.
