PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes - Managing Non ASCII Character Strings

PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes

Dr. Herong Yang, Version 2.21

Managing Non ASCII Character Strings

Part: 1 2 3 4 5

PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes © Dr. Herong Yang

Non ASCII Characters with MySQL

Inputting Non ASCII Characters

Controlling Response Header Lines

HTTP Request Variables

Sessions

Using Cookies

PHP SOAP Extension

PHP SOAP Extension - Server

Directories, Files and Images

Using MySQL with PHP

... Table of Contents

(Continued from previous part...)

For approach #1, you need turn off HTTP input and output encoding conversion by these php.ini settings:

mbstring.language = Neutral
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_input = pass
mbstring.http_output = pass
mbstring.encoding_translation = Off

While writing your script, you must always remember that you are dealing with UTF-8 encoded strings.

Approach #2 is useful, if you want your Web page to be GB2312 encoded while using UTF-8 as your script internal encoding, and you want your script to control the HTTP input and output conversion process. Here are the php.ini settings:

mbstring.language = Neutral
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_input = pass
mbstring.http_output = pass
mbstring.encoding_translation = Off

Approach #3 is useful, if you want your Web page to be UTF-8 encoded while using UTF-16 as your script internal encoding, and you trust the PHP engine to do HTTP input and output encoding conversion. Here are the php.ini settings:

mbstring.language = Neutral
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_input = GB2312
mbstring.http_output = GB2312
mbstring.encoding_translation = On

Since approach #2 is more challenging than the others, I wrote the following script to give you some ideas:

<?php # MbStringHttp.php
# Copyright (c) 2006 by Dr. Herong Yang, http://www.herongyang.com/
#
   mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");

#- Taking care of HTTP input conversion
   $myRequest['English'] = "";
   $myRequest['ChineseUtf8'] = "";
   $myRequest['ChineseGb2312'] = "";
   foreach ($_REQUEST as $k => $v) {
      $myRequest[$k] = mb_convert_encoding($v,"UTF-8", "GB2312");
   }
   $r_English = $myRequest['English'];
   $r_ChineseUtf8 = $myRequest['ChineseUtf8'];
   $r_ChineseGb2312 = $myRequest['ChineseGb2312'];

#- Taking care of HTTP output conversion
   mb_http_output("GB2312");
   ob_start("mb_output_handler");

#- Generating HTML document
   print("<html>");
   print('<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"'
      .' content="text/html; charset=gb2312"/>');
   print("<body>\n");
   print("<form action=MbStringHttp.php method=get>");
   print("English ASCII: <input name=English"
      ." value='$r_English' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Chinese UTF-8: <input name=ChineseUtf8"
      ." value='$r_ChineseUtf8' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Chinese GB2312: <input name=ChineseGb2312"
      ." value='$r_ChineseGb2312' size=16><br>\n");
   print("<input type=submit name=submit value=Submit>\n");
   print("</form>\n");

#- Outputing input strings back to HTML document
   print("<hr>");
   print("<pre>");
   print("{$myRequest['English']}\n");
   print("{$myRequest['ChineseUtf8']}\n");
   print("{$myRequest['ChineseGb2312']}\n");
   print("</pre>");
   print("</body>");
   print("</html>");

#- Dumping input strings to a file
   $file = fopen("\\temp\\MbStringHttp.txt", 'ab');
   $str = "--- Query String ---\n";
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   if (array_key_exists('QUERY_STRING',$_SERVER)) {
      $str = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
   } else {
      $str = NULL;
   }
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));

   $str = "--- Raw reqeust input ---\n";
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   foreach ($_REQUEST as $k => $v) {
      $str = "$k = ($v)\n";
      fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   }

   $str = "--- Converted reqeust input ---\n";
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   foreach ($myRequest as $k => $v) {
      $str = "$k = ($v)\n";
      fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   }
   fclose($file);
?>

(Continued on next part...)

Part: 1 2 3 4 5

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2006

PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes - Managing Non ASCII Character Strings