file_get_contents() Breaks Up UTF-8 Characters

user_95944 0
Viewed 128833

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>
file-get-contents utf-8 php
11 Answers
user_2088090

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?

user_959440

Exemple :

$string = file_get_contents(".../File.txt");
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', "ISO-8859-1");
echo $string;
user_120786600

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);
user_29783650

I managed to solve using this function below:

function file_get_contents_utf8($url) {
    $content = file_get_contents($url);
    return mb_convert_encoding($content, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8");
}

file_get_contents_utf8($url);
user_141969140

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.

user_21253220

I had a similar problem, what solved it was html_entity_decode.

My code is:

$content = file_get_contents("http://example.com/fr");
$x = new SimpleXMLElement($content);
foreach($x->channel->item as $entry) {
    $subEntry = html_entity_decode($entry->description);
}

In here I am retrieving an xml file (in French), that's why I'm using this $x object variable. And only then I decode it into this variable $subEntry.

I tried mb_convert_encoding but this didn't work for me.

user_96970740

Try this function

function mb_html_entity_decode($string) {
if (extension_loaded('mbstring') === true)
{
    mb_language('Neutral');
    mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
    mb_detect_order(array('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-15', 'ISO-8859-1', 'ASCII'));

    return mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');
}

return html_entity_decode($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

}

user_21834310
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