Wikipedia weird encoding answer for file_get_contents

Question

<?php

ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT x.y; Win64; x64; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.1');

echo file_get_contents('http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil', false, $context);

//echo file_get_contents('http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina');

//echo file_get_contents('http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France');

Wikipedia's answer is something like an encoding issue (I can't post it because StackOverflow post rules but you can see it if you run the script).

(etc.)

That's for Brazil and Argentina. But with other pages (like France) it works well. Any idea of whats happening? The pages works well with a browser, by the way.

Answer 1

Finally, I found the problem. I was receiving a gzip compressed HTML. I solved the problem using a php function to uncompress the HTML when the string appears to be binary.

I though cURL would handle the encryption in a transparent way for the developer, but I had the same problem. I think it's probably a Wikipedia issue.

Answer 2

If you're running this from console, make sure that it uses UTF-8 (should be so in Linux, not sure if it's possible at all in Windows).

If you're getting it from web, add header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); to the beginning of your script to inform the browser of the correct encoding.