wchar_t to a PHP UTF8 File

Question

i wrote a php script which recieves http POST packages from a windows-client-software.

the windows client uses the "WinHttpClient" for C++.

the WinHttpClient takes the messages i send as wchar_t.

the problem now is, i recieve the messages on my PHP file, but some signs like the "®" sign are shown as "®".

as far as i know, i cannot change the charset of my client to utf-8 or something like that. but maybe some people here know how to "convert" the wide-chars to an utf8 with which PHP can work fine. Because i have to persist the data into an Database which runs only with utf-8.

I tried it with the following, but it doesnt change it :(

function ewchar_to_utf8($matches) {
    $ewchar = $matches[1];
    $binwchar = hexdec($ewchar);
    $wchar = chr(($binwchar >> 8) & 0xFF) . chr(($binwchar) & 0xFF);
    return iconv("unicodebig", "utf-8", $wchar);
}

function special_unicode_to_utf8($str) {
return preg_replace_callback("/\\\u([[:xdigit:]]{4})/i", "ewchar_to_utf8", $str);
}

maybe you got some ideas :) Thanks

Answer 1

the problem now is, i recieve the messages on my PHP file, but some signs like the "®" sign are shown as "®".

That means you already have UTF-8... misinterpreted in ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252.

If it's like this

<?php

echo $rsymbol; //Comes out as ®

Then all you need to change:

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
echo $rsymbol; //Comes out as ®

Answer 2

Windows wchar_t is UTF-16LE, so try $u8str = iconv('UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8', $input);

But from what I can see on the WinHttpClient site, it has a _b_str class so you can convert to bytes - it doesn't say if that's via UTF-8, but if all else fails you can use WideCharToMultiByte() with CP_UTF8 codepage to get a suitable byte buffer to POST.

Answer 3

This is a good PHP Function to use for converting the entire string you get in wchar_t to UTF-8: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php - Use PHP Info to make sure the version of PHP you have supports MultiByte Strings.

The MultiByte library can help you if you aren't sure of the encoding as well with mb_detect_encoding() or to validate that a string is in a particular encoding using mb_check_encoding().