Convert utf8-characters to iso-88591 and back in PHP

Question

Some of my script are using different encoding, and when I try to combine them, this has becom an issue.

But I can't change the encoding they use, instead I want to change the encodig of the result from script A, and use it as parameter in script B.

So: is there any simple way to change a string from UTF-8 to ISO-88591 in PHP? I have looked at utf_encode and _decode, but they doesn't do what i want. Why doesn't there exsist any "utf2iso()"-function, or similar?

I don't think I have characters that can't be written in ISO-format, so that shouldn't be an huge issue.

Answer 1

Have a look at iconv() or mb_convert_encoding(). Just by the way: why don't utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() work for you?

utf8_decode — Converts a string with ISO-8859-1 characters encoded with UTF-8 to single-byte ISO-8859-1

utf8_encode — Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8

So essentially

$utf8 = 'ÄÖÜ'; // file must be UTF-8 encoded
$iso88591_1 = utf8_decode($utf8);
$iso88591_2 = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $utf8);
$iso88591_2 = mb_convert_encoding($utf8, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');

$iso88591 = 'ÄÖÜ'; // file must be ISO-8859-1 encoded
$utf8_1 = utf8_encode($iso88591);
$utf8_2 = iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8', $iso88591);
$utf8_2 = mb_convert_encoding($iso88591, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');

all should do the same - with utf8_en/decode() requiring no special extension, mb_convert_encoding() requiring ext/mbstring and iconv() requiring ext/iconv.

Answer 2

First of all, don't use different encodings. It leads to a mess, and UTF-8 is definitely the one you should be using everywhere.

Chances are your input is not ISO-8859-1, but something else (ISO-8859-15, Windows-1252). To convert from those, use iconv or mb_convert_encoding.

Nevertheless, utf8_encode and utf8_decode should work for ISO-8859-1. It would be nice if you could post a link to a file or a uuencoded or base64 example string for which the conversion fails or yields unexpected results.

Answer 3

set meta tag in head as

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> 

use the link http://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html to replace the symbols character you want.

then use str_replace like

    $find = array('“', '’', '…', '—', '–', '‘', 'é', 'Â', '•', 'Ëœ', 'â€'); // en dash
                        $replace = array('“', '’', '…', '—', '–', '‘', 'é', '', '•', '˜', '”');
$content = str_replace($find, $replace, $content);

Its the method i use and help alot. Thanks!

Answer 4

It is much better to use

$value = mb_convert_encode($value,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8');

Specially when you are using AJAX call for submitting 'ISO-8859-1' characters. It works for Chinese, Japanese, Czech, German and many more languages.

Answer 5

You need to use the iconv package, specifically its iconv function.

Answer 6

I use this function:

function formatcell($data, $num, $fill=" ") {
    $data = trim($data);
    $data=str_replace(chr(13),' ',$data);
    $data=str_replace(chr(10),' ',$data);
    // translate UTF8 to English characters
    $data = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $data);
    $data = preg_replace("/[\'\"\^\~\`]/i", '', $data);


    // fill it up with spaces
    for ($i = strlen($data); $i < $num; $i++) {
        $data .= $fill;
    }
    // limit string to num characters
   $data = substr($data, 0, $num);

    return $data;
}


echo formatcell("YES UTF8 String Zürich", 25, 'x'); //YES UTF8 String Zürichxxx
echo formatcell("NON UTF8 String Zurich", 25, 'x'); //NON UTF8 String Zurichxxx

Check out my function in my blog http://www.unexpectedit.com/php/php-handling-non-english-characters-utf8

Answer 7

I used:

function utf8_to_html ($data) {
    return preg_replace(
        array (
            '/ä/',
            '/ö/',
            '/ü/',
            '/é/',
            '/à/',
            '/è/'
        ),
        array (
            'ä',
            'ö',
            'ü',
            'é',
            'à',
            'è'
        ),
        $data 
    );
}

Answer 8

In my case after files with names containing those characters were uploaded, they were not even visible with Filezilla! In Cpanel filemanager they were shown with ? (under black background). And this combination made it shown correctly on the browser (HTML document is Western-encoded):

$dspFileName = utf8_decode(htmlspecialchars(iconv(mb_internal_encoding(), 'utf-8', basename($thisFile['path']))) );

Answer 9

Use html_entity_decode() and htmlentities().

$html = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($html, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-1');

htmlentities() formats your input into UTF8 and html_entity_decode() formats it back to ISO-8859-1.

Answer 10

function parseUtf8ToIso88591(&$string){
     if(!is_null($string)){
            $iso88591_1 = utf8_decode($string);
            $iso88591_2 = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $string);
            $string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');       
     }
}