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If time zones are hard then UTF-8 is a whole other problem and many developers don’t even know what it is. PHP can help you out, but you need to enable UTF-8 for the database, HTTP headers, HTML output, and when working with strings.
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Most text on the Internet is a special
collection of bits defined in some sort of
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character set.
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These days, that character set is probably
UTF-8,
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which stands for Unicode Transfer Format.
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The 8 is just to differentiate it from
other types of UTF character sets,
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which store things a little differently.
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Over the last ten years, UTF-8 has taken
over from other character sets as
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the most popular character encoding, and
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is able to fit pretty much any character
you would want to insert as text.
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UTF-8 can handle all Unicode characters,
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including international characters,
symbols, and things like emoticons.
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Whether supporting fancy emoticons is
something that interests you or
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not, supporting international characters
outside of the basic a to z
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range is very important.
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Even if your application is launching
somewhere like the U.S.A. or
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United Kingdom, lots of people have
special characters in their name and
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that will need UTF-8 to support things
like accented characters and Cyrillics.
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PHP will work with UTF-8 content and
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is getting more features to make it even
easier.
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But much of that functionality is tucked
away in a non-default extension
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called mbstring.
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Before we can work with mbstring, we need
to make sure it's enabled.
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So open up index.php and I'll show you how
to check.
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On line 3, we're calling the core function
phpinfo.
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This function will output all sorts of
useful information to the screen,
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including information about installed and
enabled modules.
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On line 4, the exit statement is being
used to halt execution of the script,
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and none of the rest of this code will
run.
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We'll get to that in a second.
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But first, let's click on the eye icon to
preview this script and
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see what phpinfo shows us.
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If we use the Find functionality in our
browser, we can type mbstring.
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And not this first part, this is what we
want to see here.
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If the mbstring section is missing or
disabled, then you will need to enable it.
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But luckily for us, it's always enabled on
Workspaces.
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Let's go back to our workspace and remove
lines 3 or 4, and
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then take a look at the rest of this code.
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On line 6, we're calling the function
named mb_internal_encoding.
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We pass it a string argument with the name
of our encoding, which, in this case,
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is UTF-8.
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This lets the mbstring extension know
which character encoding we
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wish to work with.
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On line 7, we call a function named
mb_http_output.
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And once again, we pass it a string as an
argument containing UTF-8.
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This lets mbstring know that our HTML will
be output as UTF-8.
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These two lines might seem like they're
overkill, but
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it's handy to be verbose when working with
UTF-8.
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Line 9 is a string variable called string.
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It's full of accented characters that do
not exist in ASCII but do exist in UTF-8.
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On line 11 here, we're using the header
function to set the HTTP header manually.
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Headers are separated by name and value
with a colon.
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And in this instance, we're setting the
content type to text/html.
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That's not too interesting as that's the
default header anyway, but
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we're also appending an extra attribute.
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By setting charset UTF-8 here, we're
letting the browser know that
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any HTML following this is going to be
UTF-8 too.
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Finally, we're outputting a basic HTML
page with a title and a body.
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This contains two paragraphs.
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The first paragraph is going to output an
uppercased version of this string, and
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the second is going to output the length
of the string.
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Let's see what happens when we try and
refresh the browser.
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Now these results look a little funny.
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PHP is doing its best to try and uppercase
a string, but
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it would only be able to change the case
of non-Unicode characters.
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Also, if we asked for the length of this
string, the Unicode characters will
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confuse PHP and make it think the string
is longer than it really is.
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Really, this string is only 36 characters
long to a human, but PHP thinks it's 41.
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We can fix this quite easily by using the
mb extension functions.
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All we have to do here is append mb to the
front.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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And there we go.
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Now the count is correctly 36 characters
and all of the characters being uppercase,
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not just the ASCII ones.
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There's a mbstring replacement function
for pretty much every core
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string function, so just try shoving mb on
the front and it should work.
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This will get you started working with the
UTF-8 and PHP.
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But once you start interacting with a
database,
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you'll need to get that set up as UTF-8
too.
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Visit PHP The Right Way to see a little
bit about how that all works.
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Let's move on to the next stage.
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