PHP and UTF-8 (Unicode) - A funny thing for a half of a day

It is not the advice of mine, but it helped me enormously.

I’ve to accomplish the state when all of my pages are in UTF-8 encoding, but the DB is also OK.

That’s what helped me - combining this advice with one line in PHP code while connecting to the DB

MySQL + Apache + PHP + mb_string :)

In mysql, following to PHPMyAdmin everything was set to utf-8. But I had to correct this line in database connection line:


mysql_select_db("****") and mysql_query("set names utf8") and
mysql_query("SET collation_connection = 'utf8_general_ci'");

Then I’ve added inside all .htaccess files of all html/php folders (why I am doing these strange things - in that advise) the next lines:


# unicode support
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
<IfModule mod_charset.c>
   CharsetDisable on
   CharsetRecodeMultipartForms Off
</IfModule>

php_value       mbstring.func_overload  7
php_value       default_charset         UTF-8
php_value       mbstring.language       Russian

php_value       mbstring.internal_encoding      UTF-8
php_flag        mbstring.encoding_translation   on
php_value       mbstring.http_input     "UTF-8,KOI8-R,CP1251"
php_value       mbstring.http_output    UTF-8
php_value       mbstring.detect_order   "UTF-8,KOI8-R,CP1251"
# end

And, of course, I’ve re-encoded all my pages and php-files in UTF-8 (used PSPad).

And in HTML-pages I’ve added this, just be on the safe side:


<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>

And everything started to work great and in UTF-8! (this method was used in next post)