How to set text file encoding in PHP?

Question

How can I set a text file ENCODING (for instance UTF-8) in PHP?

Let me show you my problem. This is my code:

<?php 
file_put_contents('test.txt', $data); // data is some non-English text with UTF-8 charset
?>

Output: اÙ!

fwrite() has the similar output.

But when I create the test.txt by notepad and set the charset UTF-8 the output is what I want. I wanna set the charset in the PHP file.

Now this is my question: How to set text file encoding by PHP?

Answer 1

You may try this using mb_convert_encoding

$data = mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', 'auto');
file_put_contents('test.txt', $data);

Also check iconv.

Update : (try this and find the right encoding for your text)

foreach(mb_list_encodings() as $chr){ 
    echo mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', $chr)." : ".$chr."<br>";    
}

Also, try this on GitHub.