Character Encoding issue with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

Question

I am using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ to fetch data like Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Tags from other domains and then insert it into database.

But I have some issues with encoding. The problem is that I do not get correct characters from those website which is not in English Language.

Below is the code:

<?php
require 'init.php';

$curl = new curl();
$html = new simple_html_dom();

$page = $_GET['page'];

$curl_output = $curl->getPage($page);

$html->load($curl_output['content']);
$meta_title = $html->find('title', 0)->innertext;

print $meta_title . "<hr />";

// print $html->plaintext . "<hr />";
?>

Output for facebook.compage

Welcome to Facebook — Log in, sign up or learn more

Output for amazon.cnpage

亚马逊-网上购物商城：è¦ç½‘è´­, å°±æ¥Z.cn!

Output for mail.rupage

Mail.Ru: почта, поиÑк в интернете, новоÑти, игры, развлечениÑ

So, the characters is not being encoded properly.

Can anyone help me how to solve this issue so that I can add correct data into my database.

Answer 1

@deceze and @Shakti thanks for your help.

+1 for the article link posted by deceze (Handling Unicode Front to Back in a Web App) and it also worth reading Understanding encoding

After reading your comments, answer and of course those two articles, I finally solved my issue.

I have listed the steps I did so far to solve this issue:

1. Added header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); on the top of my init.php file,
2. Changed CHARACTER SET of my database table field which is storing those value to UTF-8,
3. Set MySQL connection charset to UTF-8 mysql_set_charset('utf8', $connection_link_id);
4. Used htmlentities() function to convert characters $meta_title = htmlentities(trim($meta_title_raw), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Now the issue seems to be solved, BUT I still have to do following thing to solve this issue in FULL.

1. Get the encoded charset from the source $source_charset.
2. Change the encoding of the string into UTF-8 if it is already not in the same encoding. For this the only available PHP function is iconv(). Example: iconv($source_charset, "UTF-8", $meta_title_raw);

For getting $source_charset I probably have to use some tricks or multi checking. Like checking headers and meta tag etc. I found a good answer at Detect encoding

Let me know if there are any improvements or any fault on my steps above.