I have some Arabic text that needs to be displayed in my php file - but the characters are not recognized.
How do I create a document with Arabic support?
Problem will be here that your browser is not capable due to a necessary font or character table which is not being used. Have a look at this testpage in order to find out if your browser is capable of displaying arabic characters with its actual setting.
This page covers the necessary browser settings to display arabic characters.
Ensure that you're using UTF-8 charset all the way. UTF-8 supports all characters the world is aware of. Save the PHP file as UTF-8. Set the DB table charset to UTF-8. Set the DB connection charset to UTF-8. Set the HTTP response header charset to UTF-8. See also PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet.