How to properly display Chinese characters in PHP?

Question

I have these Chinese characters:

汉字/漢字''test

If I do

echo utf8_encode($chinesevar);

it displays

??/??''test

Or even if I just do a simple

echo $chinesevar

it still displays some weird characters...

So how am I going to display these Chinese characters without using the <meta> tag with the UTF-8 thingy .. or the ini_set UTF-8 thing or even the header() thing with UTF-8?

Answer 1

$chinesevarOK = mb_convert_encoding($chinesevar, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8');

Answer 2

Simple:

1. save your source code in UTF-8

2. output an HTTP header to specify to your browser that it should interpret the page using UTF-8:

   header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
   

Done.

utf8_encode is for converting Latin-1 encoded strings to UTF-8. You don't need it.

For more details, see Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App.

Answer 3

Look that your file is in UTF8 without BOM and that your webserver deliver your site in UTF-8

HTML:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

in PHP:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

And if you work with a database look that your database is in UTF-8 if you read the text from your database.