Preparing PHP application to use with UTF-8

Question

UTF-8 is de facto standard for web applications now, but PHP this is not a default encoding for PHP (until 6.0). Most of the server is set up for the ISO-8859-1 encoding by default.

How to overload the default settings in the .htaccess to be sure that everything goes well for UTF-8, locale etc.? Any options for the web server, Unix OS?

Is there any comprehensive list of those settings? E.g. mbstring options, iconv settings, locale etc I should set up for each multi language project? Any pre defined .htaccess as an example?

(In my particular case I need setup for the languages: English, Dutch and Russian. The server is in Ukraine).

Answer 1

Some useful options to have in .htaccess:

########################################
# Locale settings
########################################

# See: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
php_value date.timezone "Europe/Amsterdam"

SetEnv   LC_ALL  nl_NL.UTF-8

########################################
# Set up UTF-8 encoding
########################################

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
AddCharset UTF-8 .php

php_value default_charset "UTF-8"

php_value iconv.input_encoding "UTF-8"
php_value iconv.internal_encoding "UTF-8"
php_value iconv.output_encoding "UTF-8"

php_value mbstring.internal_encoding UTF-8
php_value mbstring.http_output UTF-8
php_value mbstring.encoding_translation On
php_value mbstring.func_overload 6

# See also php functions:
# mysql_set_charset
# mysql_client_encoding

# database settings
#CREATE DATABASE db_name
#   CHARACTER SET utf8
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;
#
#ALTER DATABASE db_name
#   CHARACTER SET utf8
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;

#ALTER TABLE tbl_name
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;