file_get_contents() Breaks Up UTF-8 Characters

Richard Knop picture Richard Knop · Feb 10, 2010 · Viewed 113.3k times · Source

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>

Answer

ugniesdebesys picture ugniesdebesys · Mar 3, 2013

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 !!!!!!