PHP 5.6 upgrade and special characters

Question

I have a website where I\'ve used php to include sections rather than having code be duplicated for each page.
However, recently my webhost upgraded the PHP to 5.6, and

Answer 1

PHP 5.6 changes the default value of default_charset to UTF-8. The value should better be set.

If the charset of your php files is ISO-8859-1 (all in the directory) you can easy put a .htaccess File in the root directory:

php_value default_charset ISO-8859-1

If only some of your files are in ISO-8859-1 you can easy send a header in the first line of the php file (no need for default_charset):

Or convert the encoding of php textfiles to utf8 and don't change defaults.