Proper character encoding to display "”"?
I'm having some nasty character encoding problems that I just can't figure out.
Essentially, I'm screen scraping some HTML off of a site using PHP, then running it through PHP's DOMDocument to change out some URL's, etc., and when it's done, it outputs HTML with some weird things. Ex: where there should be an end quote, it puts out ”
I have the page's meta tag for charset set to utf-8 but then the ” characters are showing up as †on the site. I'm not sure if I just don't understand character encoding, or what.
Any suggestions on the best way to resolve this? Something client side with a meta tag, or some kind of server-side PHP conversion?
Answer
Sometimes setting the charset in HTML or the response header isn't enough. If everything isn't setup for UTF-8 on your server, your text may get incorrectly converted somewhere along the way. You may need to enable UTF-8 encoding for both Apache and PHP right in their config files. (If you're not using Apache, try skipping that step.)
Apache UTF-8 setup:
Edit either your charset.conf (ideal), or httpd.conf file, by adding this line to the end:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
(If you don't have access to Apache's config files, you can create a ".htaccess" file in your HTML's root directory with that same code.)
PHP UTF-8 setup:
Edit your php.ini file, searching for "default_charset", and change it to:
default_charset = "utf-8"
Restart Apache:
Depending on your server type, this command may do the trick via command line:
sudo service apache2 restart