Why are UTF-8 Characters Corrupted When Using `file_get_contents()`?

file_get_contents() Interrupts UTF-8 Characters

The issue arises when loading HTML from an external server with UTF-8 encoding. Characters like ľ, š, č, ť, ž are corrupted and replaced with invalid characters.

The Root of the Problem

The file_get_contents() function may be encountering encoding issues. By default, it interprets the data as ASCII, which fails to handle UTF-8 characters correctly.

Proposed Solution

To resolve this, consider using an alternative encoding method.

1. Manual Encoding Conversion

Use the mb_convert_encoding() function to convert the fetched HTML to UTF-8:

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.com/foreign.html');
$utf8_html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($html, 'UTF-8', true));

2. Output Encoding

Ensure the output is properly encoded by adding the following line to the script:

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

3. HTML Entity Conversion

Convert the fetched HTML to HTML entities before outputting it:

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.com/foreign.html');
$html_entities = htmlentities($html, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
echo $html_entities;

4. JSON Decoding

If the external HTML is stored as JSON, decode it using the JSON class:

$json = file_get_contents('http://example.com/foreign.html');
$decoded_json = json_decode($json, true);
$html = $decoded_json['html'];

By utilizing these techniques, you can circumvent the encoding issues caused by file_get_contents() and ensure the proper display of UTF-8 characters.

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