How to handle user input of invalid UTF-8 characters?

Question

I\'m looking for general a strategy/advice on how to handle invalid UTF-8 input from users.

Even though my webapp uses UTF-8, somehow some users enter invalid chara

Answer 1

For completeness to this question (not necessarily the best answer)...

function as_utf8($s) {
    return mb_convert_encoding($s, "UTF-8", mb_detect_encoding($s));
}

Answer 2

The accept-charset="UTF-8" attribute is only a guideline for browsers to follow, they are not forced to submit that in that way, crappy form submission bots are a good example...

What I usually do is ignore bad chars, either via iconv() or with the less reliable utf8_encode() / utf8_decode() functions, if you use iconv you also have the option to transliterate bad chars.

Here is an example using iconv():

$str_ignore = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $str);
$str_translit = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $str);

If you want to display an error message to your users I'd probably do this in a global way instead of a per value received basis, something like this would probably do just fine:

function utf8_clean($str)
{
    return iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $str);
}

$clean_GET = array_map('utf8_clean', $_GET);

if (serialize($_GET) != serialize($clean_GET))
{
    $_GET = $clean_GET;
    $error_msg = 'Your data is not valid UTF-8 and has been stripped.';
}

// $_GET is clean!

You may also want to normalize new lines and strip (non-)visible control chars, like this:

function Clean($string, $control = true)
{
    $string = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $string);

    if ($control === true)
    {
            return preg_replace('~\p{C}+~u', '', $string);
    }

    return preg_replace(array('~\r\n?~', '~[^\P{C}\t\n]+~u'), array("\n", ''), $string);
}

---

Code to convert from UTF-8 to Unicode codepoints:

function Codepoint($char)
{
    $result = null;
    $codepoint = unpack('N', iconv('UTF-8', 'UCS-4BE', $char));

    if (is_array($codepoint) && array_key_exists(1, $codepoint))
    {
        $result = sprintf('U+%04X', $codepoint[1]);
    }

    return $result;
}

echo Codepoint('à'); // U+00E0
echo Codepoint('ひ'); // U+3072

Probably faster than any other alternative, haven't tested it extensively though.

---

Example:

$string = 'hello world�';

// U+FFFEhello worldU+FFFD
echo preg_replace_callback('/[\p{So}\p{Cf}\p{Co}\p{Cs}\p{Cn}]/u', 'Bad_Codepoint', $string);

function Bad_Codepoint($string)
{
    $result = array();

    foreach ((array) $string as $char)
    {
        $codepoint = unpack('N', iconv('UTF-8', 'UCS-4BE', $char));

        if (is_array($codepoint) && array_key_exists(1, $codepoint))
        {
            $result[] = sprintf('U+%04X', $codepoint[1]);
        }
    }

    return implode('', $result);
}

Is this what you were looking for?

Answer 3

I put together a fairly simple class to check if input is in UTF-8 and to run through utf8_encode() as needs be:

class utf8
{

    /**
     * @param array $data
     * @param int $options
     * @return array
     */
    public static function encode(array $data)
    {
        foreach ($data as $key=>$val) {
            if (is_array($val)) {
                $data[$key] = self::encode($val, $options);
            } else {
                if (false === self::check($val)) {
                    $data[$key] = utf8_encode($val);
                }
            }
        }

        return $data;
    }

    /**
     * Regular expression to test a string is UTF8 encoded
     * 
     * RFC3629
     * 
     * @param string $string The string to be tested
     * @return bool
     * 
     * @link http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-forms-utf-8.en.php
     */
    public static function check($string)
    {
        return preg_match('%^(?:
            [\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E]              # ASCII
            | [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]             # non-overlong 2-byte
            |  \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]        # excluding overlongs
            | [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}  # straight 3-byte
            |  \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]        # excluding surrogates
            |  \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}     # planes 1-3
            | [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}          # planes 4-15
            |  \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}     # plane 16
            )*$%xs',
            $string);
    }
}

// For example
$data = utf8::encode($_POST);

Answer 4

How about stripping all chars outside your given subset. At least in some parts of my application I would not allow using chars outside the [a-Z] [0-9 sets], for example usernames. You can build a filter function that strips silently all chars outside this range, or that returns an error if it detects them and pushes the decision to the user.

Answer 5

There is a multibyte extension for PHP, check it out: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mbstring.php

You should try mb_check_encoding() function.

Good luck!

Answer 6

I recommend merely not allowing garbage to get in. Don't rely on custom functions, which can bog your system down. Simply walk the submitted data against an alphabet you design. Create an acceptable alphabet string and walk the submitted data, byte by byte, as if it were an array. Push acceptable characters to a new string, and omit unacceptable characters. The data you store in your database then is data triggered by the user, but not actually user-supplied data.

EDIT #4: Replacing bad character with entiy: �

EDIT #3: Updated : Sept 22 2010 @ 1:32pm Reason: Now string returned is UTF-8, plus I used the test file you provided as proof.

<?php
// build alphabet
// optionally you can remove characters from this array

$alpha[]= chr(0); // null
$alpha[]= chr(9); // tab
$alpha[]= chr(10); // new line
$alpha[]= chr(11); // tab
$alpha[]= chr(13); // carriage return

for ($i = 32; $i <= 126; $i++) {
$alpha[]= chr($i);
}

/* remove comment to check ascii ordinals */

// /*
// foreach ($alpha as $key=>$val){
//  print ord($val);
//  print '<br/>';
// }
// print '<hr/>';
//*/
// 
// //test case #1
// 
// $str = 'afsjdfhasjhdgljhasdlfy42we875y342q8957y2wkjrgSAHKDJgfcv kzXnxbnSXbcv   '.chr(160).chr(127).chr(126);
// 
// $string = teststr($alpha,$str);
// print $string;
// print '<hr/>';
// 
// //test case #2
// 
// $str = ''.'©?™???';
// $string = teststr($alpha,$str);
// print $string;
// print '<hr/>';
// 
// $str = '©';
// $string = teststr($alpha,$str);
// print $string;
// print '<hr/>';

$file = 'http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt';
$testfile = implode(chr(10),file($file));

$string = teststr($alpha,$testfile);
print $string;
print '<hr/>';


function teststr(&$alpha, &$str){
    $strlen = strlen($str);
    $newstr = chr(0); //null
    $x = 0;
    if($strlen >= 2){

        for ($i = 0; $i < $strlen; $i++) {
            $x++;
            if(in_array($str[$i],$alpha)){
                // passed
                $newstr .= $str[$i];
            }else{
                // failed
                print 'Found out of scope character. (ASCII: '.ord($str[$i]).')';
                print '<br/>';
                $newstr .= '&#65533;';
            }
        }
    }elseif($strlen <= 0){
        // failed to qualify for test
        print 'Non-existent.';

    }elseif($strlen === 1){
        $x++;
        if(in_array($str,$alpha)){
            // passed

            $newstr = $str;
        }else{
            // failed
            print 'Total character failed to qualify.';
            $newstr = '&#65533;';
        }
    }else{
        print 'Non-existent (scope).';
        }

if(mb_detect_encoding($newstr, "UTF-8") == "UTF-8"){
// skip
}else{
    $newstr = utf8_encode($newstr);
}


// test encoding:
if(mb_detect_encoding($newstr, "UTF-8")=="UTF-8"){
    print 'UTF-8 :D<br/>';
    }else{
        print 'ENCODED: '.mb_detect_encoding($newstr, "UTF-8").'<br/>';
        }




return $newstr.' (scope: '.$x.', '.$strlen.')';
}