how to get utf 8 encoded file with php

Question

I want to get a .html or .txt file from a folder with PHP, but this file is UTF-8 encoded, and if I use $html=file_get_contents('somewhere/somewhat.html'); and after that I echo $html; then this won't be UTF-8 encoded. I see many "�" in the text. Any idea? How can I prevent this?

Answer 1

Try to use iconv on your string: http://php.net/manual/pl/function.iconv.php

Other solution: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php

Or: http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php

Answer 2

You need to convert it to UTF8 yourselves. To do that use mb_convert_encoding() and mb_detect_encoding() PHP functions.

Like this,

$html=file_get_contents('somewhere/somewhat.html');
$html=mb_convert_encoding($html, 'UTF-8',mb_detect_encoding($html, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true));
echo $html;

mb_convert_encoding() converts character encoding
mb_detect_encoding() detects character encoding