14 replies to this topic

[thatsme]

Hi. I want php to read text from xml file. The text contains lithuanian letters. However, no matter what encoding i set, php never reads lithuanian letters. I tried such encodings in xml file: utf-8, utf-16, windows-1257 and few others that support lithuanian letters. I have also set encoding in php file with header function but it does not help. Does anyone know what i am doing wrong?

[dargueta]

What do you mean by "it doesn't read" them. Where are you outputting them to?

[Alexander]

You would also need to tell us where the problem lies, PHP has no concept of encoding (and will not read anything wrong), however it could either parse it wrong, or the browser could display it wrongly.

Edited by Alexander, 22 July 2011 - 03:26 AM.

[dargueta]

Also, make sure you have this as the first line of your XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" charset="utf-8"?>​

[thatsme]

dargueta said:

What do you mean by "it doesn't read" them. Where are you outputting them to?

I mean that insted of ę browser displays e, instead of ą displays a and so on. php program reads text from xml and outputs it to html. encoding in html is set correctly

[Alexander]

thatsme said:

I mean that insted of ę browser displays e, instead of ą displays a and so on. php program reads text from xml and outputs it to html. encoding in html is set correctly

Can you tell us how you are reading this XML file? We are shooting in the dark, you could be using a software of which explicitly converts your encoding to a western encoding or does not respect it.

[thatsme]

I use wamp 2.1 and php dom parser. I use this line to create DOMDocument: $xmlDoc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'windows-1257'); and then do all the other stuff of collecting values of nodes.

[dargueta]

Instead of windows-1257 use UTF-8.

[thatsme]

that didn't help :( Now it's even worse: before switching encoding to utf-8 strings in php code containing lithuanian letters were displayed correctly, but now both php strings and strings read from xml lost lithuanian letters

Edited by thatsme, 25 July 2011 - 07:55 AM.

[dargueta]

1) Did you re-encode the file?
2) Do you have the correct encoding specified in the<?xml ?> tag?

[thatsme]

Yes, xml xml is set to utf8: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>. html is set to utf-8 also: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>. And here's how I set it in php: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); It looks that xml fails to save lithuanian characters in file.

[dargueta]

I'd say your text editor fails to save them properly. What text editor are you using? Some Microsoft text editors put a useless byte-order mark at the beginning of all UTF-8 files so they can easily detect the encoding. A few applications choke on this and fail to render text properly.

See, for example, this famous Notepad bug.