Convert foreign characters with accents

Question

I'm trying to compare some text to the text in a database. In the database any text with an accent is encoded like in HTML (i.e. é) when I compare the database text to my string it doesn't match because my string just shows é. When I use the PHP function htmlentities to encode the string first the é turns into é weird? Using htmlspecialchars doesn't encode the é at all.

How would you suggest I compare é to é as well as all the other accented characters?

Answer 1

You need to send in the correct charset to htmlentities. It looks like you're using UTF-8, but the default is ISO-8859-1. Change it like this:

$encoded = htmlentities($text, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

Another solution is to convert the text to ISO-8859-1 before encoding, but that may destroy information (ISO-8859-1 does not contain nearly as many characters as UTF-8). If you want to try that instead, do like this:

$encoded = htmlentities(utf8_decode($text));

Answer 2

I'm working on french site, and I also had same problem. This is the function that I use.

function convert_accent($string)
{
    return htmlspecialchars_decode(htmlentities(utf8_decode($string)));
}

What it does it decodes your string to utf8, than converts everything HTML entities. even tags. But we want to convert tags back to normal, than htmlspecialchars_decode will convert them back. So in the end you will get a string with converted accents without touching tags. You can use pass through this function your email content before sending it to recipent.

Another issue you might face is that, sometimes with this function the content from database converts to ? . In this case you should do this before running your query:

mysql_query("SET NAMES `utf8`");

But you might need to do it, it depends on encoding in your table. I hope it helps.