Question

I'm using a PHP class to generate vcard: http://www.troywolf.com/articles/php/class_vcard/

But accented character do not show properly. I guess this is related to the character encoding, but I have been unable to find a way to change it.

All my files are saved as UTF8 without BOM and here is what the outpout of the script looks like:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
CLASS:PUBLIC
PRODID:-//www.bla.com//Version 1//EN
REV:2011-08-30 03:19:49
FN:Heïdi DABODFE
N:DABODFE;Heïdi;;;
TITLE:Directrice
ORG:blablabla
ADR;TYPE=work:;;2 Imp. Les Plataness;Mirepoix;;09500;France
EMAIL;TYPE=internet,pref:contact@bla.com
TEL;TYPE=work,voice:05 61 68 64 38
PHOTO;ENCODING=BASE64;TYPE=JPEG:
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URL;TYPE=work:www.bla.com
NOTE:bla
TZ:-0500
END:VCARD

Any help is much appreciated

Was it helpful?

Solution

Did you try some different programs to import this VCARD? For Version 3.0 they should be fine with utf-8 unless its name starts with "O" and ends with "tlook" ^^

See if this works for you:

FN;CHARSET=utf-8:Heïdi DABODFE
N;CHARSET=utf-8:DABODFE;Heïdi;;;

OTHER TIPS

The solution is rather something like this,

assuming $vcf to be a string containing utf-8 characters:

file_put_contents($dir.$filename, utf8_decode($vcf));

French utf-8 characters get displayed properly in Outlook, just found out.

It would be good if programs would really follow the standards! This is how they should work:

  • For vCard 2.1, you should use FN;CHARSET=utf-8;ENCODING=8BIT:Heïdi DABODFE, because it could also be ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE and many programs really do use that. I think Outlook eats this well, however Thunderbird rejects the ENCODING part (Thunderbird also exports supposedly v2.1 vCards without charset/encoding information).
  • For vCard 3.0 the possibility of using a different charset for each property disappeared (what sense did it made?). You are to use the Content-type MIME header when transferring the vCard and that's where the charset is to be specified (says section 5 of the RFC). However, you don't usually find Content-type headers in vCard files and most programs just use FN;CHARSET=utf-8;ENCODING=8BIT:Heïdi DABODFE as it was for 2.1.
  • For vCard 4.0 the charset for vCard files is always UTF-8 and there is no way to override this and it is invalid to specify a different charset in a MIME header (section 3.1 of the RFC).

The reality is that most programs treat vCard with very little care and use the same code to handle versions 2.1, 3.0 and 4.*. I generate vCard using UTF-8 to satisfy RFC 6350, use CHARSET=utf-8 to satisfy vCard 2.1 specification, avoid ENCODING=8BIT to satisfy Thunderbird and I'm currently considering adding a MIME header.

It is unfortunate that in 2015 there is still difficulty in dealing with this problem which sounds more like a problem from the 1980s.

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