Change encoding of a file to UTF-8 in PHP

Asked Dec 12 '20 at 09:48

Active Dec 12 '20 at 09:48

Viewed 680 times

I need to convert a CSV file from UCS-2LE to UTF-8 encoding. So far I've tried the following:

$str = file_get_contents($file);
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2LE'); 
file_put_contents($newfile, $str);

But the problem is PHP encoding the new file as UTF-8 BOM instead of pure UTF-8 (according to Notepad++).

Notepad++ also have options to set encoding as UTF-8 (without the BOM).

I don't understand why PHP adding BOM on UTF-8 even when I explicitly instructed it to UTF-8 only.

asked Dec 12 '20 at 09:48

Harry

1

Does this answer your question? [How to remove %EF%BB%BF in a PHP string](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4057742/how-to-remove-efbbbf-in-a-php-string) – YvesLeBorg Dec 12 '20 at 09:54
It somewhat does but does not seem to be perfect answer. – Harry Dec 12 '20 at 10:21
well, (opinion) stripping BOMs is quite imperfect :) – YvesLeBorg Dec 12 '20 at 12:23
Both `mb_convert_encoding()` and `iconv()` seem to add a BOM when converting to UTF-8 and I'm not aware of a way to control that. You'll probably need to strip it yourself. – Álvaro González Dec 12 '20 at 14:40

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