file_get_contents() Breaks Up UTF-8 Characters

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2236668

  •  19-09-2019
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Question

I am loading a HTML from an external server. The HTML markup has UTF-8 encoding and contains characters such as ľ,š,č,ť,ž etc. When I load the HTML with file_get_contents() like this:

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.com/foreign.html');

It messes up the UTF-8 characters and loads Å, ¾, ¤ and similar nonsense instead of proper UTF-8 characters.

How can I solve this?

UPDATE:

I tried both saving the HTML to a file and outputting it with UTF-8 encoding. Both doesn't work so it means file_get_contents() is already returning broken HTML.

UPDATE2:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="sk" lang="sk">
<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="sk" />
<title>Test</title>

</head>
<body>


<?php

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.com');
echo htmlentities($html);

?>

</body>
</html>
Was it helpful?

Solution 3

Alright. I have found out the file_get_contents() is not causing this problem. There's a different reason which I talk about in another question. Silly me.

See this question: Why Does DOM Change Encoding?

OTHER TIPS

I had similar problem with polish language

I tried:

$fileEndEnd = mb_convert_encoding($fileEndEnd, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($fileEndEnd, 'UTF-8', true));

I tried:

$fileEndEnd = utf8_encode ( $fileEndEnd );

I tried:

$fileEndEnd = iconv( "UTF-8", "UTF-8", $fileEndEnd );

And then -

$fileEndEnd = mb_convert_encoding($fileEndEnd, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");

This last worked perfectly !!!!!!

Solution suggested in the comments of the PHP manual entry for file_get_contents

function file_get_contents_utf8($fn) {
     $content = file_get_contents($fn);
      return mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8',
          mb_detect_encoding($content, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true));
}

You might also try your luck with http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-internal-encoding.php

I think you simply have a double conversion of the character type there :D

It may be, because you opened an html document within a html document. So you have something that looks like this in the end

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<!DOCTYPE html> 
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Test</title>.......

The use of mb_detect_encoding therefore may lead you to other issues.

Try this too

 $url = 'http://www.domain.com/';
    $html = file_get_contents($url);

    //Change encoding to UTF-8 from ISO-8859-1
    $html = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $html);

İn Turkish language, mb_convert_encoding or any other charset conversion did not work.

And also urlencode did not work because of space char converted to + char. It must be %20 for percent encoding.

This one worked!

   $url = rawurlencode($url);
   $url = str_replace("%3A", ":", $url);
   $url = str_replace("%2F", "/", $url);

   $data = file_get_contents($url);

I am working with 35000 lines of data.

$f=fopen("veri1.txt","r");
$i=0;
while(!feof($f)){
    $i++;
    $line=mb_convert_encoding(fgets($f), 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
    echo $line;
}

This code convert my strange characters into normal.

Exemple :

$string = file_get_contents(".../File.txt");
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', "ISO-8859-1");
echo $string;
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