Project conversion from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8

I coded a php project under ISO 8859-1, and for some technical reasons I want to encode the project under UTF-8. what 开发者_如何学JAVAis a better way to do it? I am afraid of loosing special characters like french accents and so on. thanks for you advice.

You should try using the shell command iconv to encode the php files from latin1 (ISO-8859-1) to UTF-8.

After that you should be sure that PHP uses UTF-8 as the default encoding (default_encoding variable in php.ini if I recall correctly). If not, then you can set it with ini_set() for your project.

After that you should convert your database to UTF-8 or use a quickfix like this (for MySQL):

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Of course you just substitute mysql_query() for whatever framework you use (if you use any). Put it into your primary file which includes all the classes and stuff.

transcode all the files with iconv. change any and all http headers or meta tags. profit.

Here's my take on your question - you want the generated HTML (via PHP) to be UTF-8 compliant? Be aware that the HTML 4.x standard is based on iso-8859-1 and it's unclear if XHTML is based on utf-8 or iso-8859-1. Of course, pure XML is utf-8.

(1) So the first piece of the puzzle is to select your DOCTYPE for your rendered HTML.

(2) Make sure you add the the language character set meta tags (charset=utf8), etc.

(3) Take the rendered PHP/HTML string and send it through iconv either via the shell using a system call or through some PHP API method.

The resulting rendered HTML will be utf-8 encoded. The client browser needs to be set to render the HTML by means of utf-8 and not western latin1. Otherwise you get a strange non-breaking space character in the upper left hand corner of the page.