What is the default encoding for php?

In the "PHP Cookbook", they say (p.589) that to properly set the character encoding of outgoing data to UTF-8, it is necessary to edit the default_encoding configuration to utf-8.

However, I cannot find this configuration in file php.ini. Should I simply add a line that would say default_encoding = "utf-8"?

I do have a ;default_charset = "iso-8859-1". As you can see (;), right now it is not activated. Should I remove the semicolon and set it to "utf-8"? Does that take care of the default encoding?

I also found other encoding directives that I don't know what to do about:

[iconv]
;iconv.input_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.internal_encoding = ISO-8859-1
;iconv.output_encoding = ISO-8859-1
...
; http://php.net/exif.encode-unicode
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
...
;mssql.charset = "ISO-8859-1"
...
;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15

Is there any reason why I shouldn't simply replace them all with utf-8?

asked Feb 19, 2012 at 18:02

1

You should set your default_charset to UTF-8:

default_charset = "utf-8"

(PHP Cookbook may have a typo in it if they ask you to change the default_encoding — I've never heard of it.)

You'll also want to make sure that your web server is set to output UTF-8 if you're going to outputting UTF-8 encoded characters. In Apache, this can be set by in the httpd.conf file:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

As for modifying the iconv, exif, and mssql encoding settings, you probably don't need to set these (your settings have these commented out anyhow), but it's a good idea to change them all to UTF-8 anyhow.

answered Feb 19, 2012 at 18:38

Ben DBen D

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6

Modify the line

;default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

to read

default_charset = "utf-8"

About the other options, do not touch them. Avoid default settings, always explicitly set the encoding of in everything you do

• database connections,
• reading and writing files,
• converting with iconv.

Also, beware of the encoding in which your PHP files are saved, make sure that they are in UTF-8, especially if they contain strings to be displayed or compared.

answered Feb 19, 2012 at 18:36

gioelegioele

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I had a problem on my MySQL query that it would not recognize some Latin accentuation, so the query would fail. I thought it could be the PHP file and so on, till I found out that using PDO to call the MySQL function I had to add the character set. The weird thing is that on the previous server I used it worked fine!

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=retirodo_main;charset=utf8';
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ^^^^^^^^^^^^

answered Oct 29, 2013 at 23:31

MiguelMiguel

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2

At the htaccess level (.htaccess file), the PHP directive should be php_value default_charset UTF-8.

answered Nov 11, 2017 at 20:45

ontananzaontananza

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To resolve it, I changed "UTF-8" to "UTF-8" (without the dash), solving the problem instead.

It was on CentOS.

answered Nov 30, 2016 at 17:44

1

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