Is your website in other language than english? Does your website contain characters that are not in the english alphabet? Then you really need your website to accept UTF-8 encoding. Of course, there are more standards (ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-2 etc), but UTF-8 gets all the characters you need.
- UTF-8 and HTML – In order to add UTF-8 characters in your static HTML files, open the files using an file editor (Notepad++, Notepad2) and change encoding to UTF-8;
- Notepad++ : Top menu -> Encoding -> Encode in UTF-8
- Notepad2 : Top Menu -> File -> Encoding-> UTF-8
For the browsers to know what encoding type you are using, add this line in the <head> section of your website:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
- UTF-8 and Javascript – If you need to write some sentences that will be replaced using javascript and are stored in .js files, you have to act as with HTML files;
- UTF-8 and PHP – In order to work with UTF-8 strings in PHP, act exactly as with HTML files. Add this line in your php files
<?php header(“Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8″);?>
Be sure to not output any character before inserting this line. Beware using functions that you must explicitly say that you want to work with UTF-8 strings, such as htmlentities and htmlspecialchars.
- Only the files that contain UTF-8 strings must have UTF-8 encoding. The other .php files can be eighter UTF-8 or other Encoding format
- UTF-8 and MySQL – If you want to store UTF-8 strings in your MySQL database, you have to make some changes to the fields you will store those strings into. For CHAR/VARCHAR/TEXT fields (and all derived by these), by default mysql sets Collation to latin_swedish_ci . This encoding does not store UTF-8 characters. So you have to change the Collation into utf_general_ci.With this done, you now have to tell PHP to communicate with mysql using UTF-8 format. In your PHP file that connects to your database, add these 2 lines right after the mysql_select_db function.
mysql_query(‘SET CHARACTER SET utf8′);
mysql_query(‘SET SESSION collation_connection =”utf8_general_ci”‘);Your code should look like this:
$dbconnect = @mysql_connect($mysql['host'], $mysql['username'], $mysql['password'], true) or die(‘Unable to connect to server’);
@mysql_select_db($mysql['db'], $dbconnect) or die(‘Could not find the database’);
mysql_query(‘SET CHARACTER SET utf8′);
mysql_query(‘SET SESSION collation_connection =”utf8_general_ci”‘);
Versiunea in limba Romana / Romanian Version: UTF-8 si siteurile web
