Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

Question

I\'m reading out lots of texts from various RSS feeds and inserting them into my database.

Of course, there are several different character encodings used in the fee

Answer 1

You need to test the character set on input since responses can come coded with different encodings.

I force all content been sent into UTF-8 by doing detection and translation using the following function:

function fixRequestCharset()
{
  $ref = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_REQUEST);
  foreach ($ref as &$var)
  {
    foreach ($var as $key => $val)
    {
      $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($var[$key], mb_detect_order(), true);
      if (!$encoding)
        continue;
      if (strcasecmp($encoding, 'UTF-8') != 0)
      {
        $encoding = iconv($encoding, 'UTF-8', $var[$key]);
        if ($encoding === false)
          continue;
        $var[$key] = $encoding;
      }
    }
  }
}

That routine will turn all PHP variables that come from the remote host into UTF-8.

Or ignore the value if the encoding could not be detected or converted.

You can customize it to your needs.

Just invoke it before using the variables.