PHP $_POST doesn't take accents

Question

This question is solved, check my answer to see the solution

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I'm trying to add to my DB a text with accented letters through an html form that submits with POST to a PHP page, the problem is that accented letters are converted to unreadable characters.

I have this form:

<form action="page.php" method="POST">
    <input type="textarea" id="text1" name="text1" />
    <input type="submit" value="Send" />
</form>

And then, in page.php:

echo $_POST['text1'];

The problem is that if i input àèìòù in my textarea and then i submit the form, i get this output:

à èìòù

My next step would be convert accented letters to html entities with htmlentities($_POST['text1'] but i need $_POST to give me the correct letters.

Note: in the page head i already have

<meta http-equiv = "Content-Type" content = "text/html; charset=utf-8" />

How can i fix this?

EDIT

I tried with

<form action="page.php" method="POST" accept-charset="UTF-8">
    <input type="textarea" id="text1" name="text1" />
    <input type="submit" value="Send" />
</form>

And it didn't solve it

EDIT 2

Also tried with adding

<meta charset='utf-8'>

to my document's head, and it doesn't work

EDIT 3

I tried with setting my charset as UTF-8 on the second page too, and

echo $_POST['text1'];

displayed the correct result.

I saw that the problem is whe i use htmlentities, with this code

echo htmlentities($_POST['text1']);

I get

àèìòù 

Which actually outputs

à èìòù 

even if i set charset in my meta-tags and header too. Does anyone know how can i solve it?

Answer 1

Ok, i finally solved it. Even if i was setting charset, no matter if setting it with PHP header

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

or with HTML meta tag

<meta http-equiv = "Content-Type" content = "text/html; charset=utf-8" />

and saving my file as UTF-8, it didn't work.

Entering àèìòù and then processing it with htmlentities was always resulting in

àèìòù 

That, in "readable" characters, is:

à èìòù

I just changed this:

echo htmlentities($_POST['text1']);

to this:

echo htmlentities($_POST['text1'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");

and everything worked, i get my real input printed out.

Thank you all for your help!

Answer 2

I'm going to go the other way - add to your PHP code <?php header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); ?>. Saves having meta tags (that some browsers casually ignore...)

From the encoding representation that you provided, PHP is echoing an UTF-8 encoded string, while your browser is assuming that the output will be ISO-8859-1. Setting that header will make all browsers understand that UTF-8 is expected, provided that they had it under Accept-encoding. if they didn't, they'll barf, but I only know of one "modern" browser that doesn't, and it is about 0.2% of the market.

Note that you will need to throw that line first, before any other output (or you can output-buffer the lot, which makes life easier but drains a bit more memory)