What is the character set if default_charset is empty

Question

In PHP 5.6 onwards the default_charset string is set to \"UTF-8\" as explained e.g. in the php.ini documentation. It says that the string is empty

Answer 1

It seems you should not rely on the internal encoding. The internal character encoding can be seen/set with mb_internal_encoding.

example phpinfo()

• PHP Version 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.5
• default_charset no value

file1.php

file2.php

both files will output ISO-8859-1 if you do not change the internal encoding manually.

Getting the hex of this character returns UTF-8 encoding. If you save the file using UTF-8 the string in this example will have 2 bytes, even if the internal encoding is not set to UTF-8. Therefore you should rely on the character encoding used for the source file.