Chinese Web Sites Using PHP - v2.23, by Herong Yang
Chinese Character Set Encoding Options
This section providing information on character set encoding options for Chinese Web pages: UTF-8, GB, and Big5
By default, Web servers and Web browsers use ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) encoding to process Web pages. ISO-8859-1 is also the default encoding for many desktop software and is good for many western languages. But ISO-8859-1 is not good enough to support Chinese characters.
To support Chinese characters in Web pages, we have 3 options:
1. Create and serve the static page with Chinese text with UTF-8 encoding. Good for both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. The Web page must contain a <meta> tag to info the browser to use UTF-8 encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
2. Create and serve the static page with Chinese text with GB encoding. Mainly for simplified Chinese characters. The Web page must contain a <meta> tag to info the browser to use GB encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=gb18030"/>
3. Create and serve the static page with Chinese text with Big5 encoding. Mainly for traditional Chinese characters. The Web page must contain a <meta> tag to info the browser to use Big5 encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5"/>
I strongly suggest you to use UTF-8 encoding for your Chinese static text pages. If you have old Web pages written in GB of Big5 encoding, you can easily convert them into UTF-8 encoding.
Table of Contents
PHP Installation on Windows Systems
Integrating PHP with Apache Web Server
►charset="*" - Encodings on Chinese Web Pages
►Chinese Character Set Encoding Options
Chinese Web Pages with UTF-8 Encoding
Chinese Web Pages with GB18030 Encoding
Chinese Web Pages with Big5 Encoding
UTF-8 Encoding Pages with GB18030 Characters
Chinese Characters in PHP String Literals
Multibyte String Functions in UTF-8 Encoding
Input Text Data from Web Forms
Input Chinese Text Data from Web Forms
MySQL - Installation on Windows
MySQL - Connecting PHP to Database
MySQL - Character Set and Encoding
MySQL - Sending Non-ASCII Text to MySQL
Retrieving Chinese Text from Database to Web Pages
Input Chinese Text Data to MySQL Database