Last updated: Fri, 10 Oct 2008

mb_convert_encoding

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.6, PHP 5)

mb_convert_encoding — Convert character encoding

Description

string mb_convert_encoding ( string $str , string $to_encoding [, mixed $from_encoding ] )

Converts the character encoding of string str to to_encoding from optionally from_encoding .

Parameters

str

The string being encoded.

to_encoding

The type of encoding that str is being converted to.

from_encoding

Is specified by character code names before conversion. It is either an array, or a comma separated enumerated list. If from_encoding is not specified, the internal encoding will be used.

"auto" may be used, which expands to "ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS".

Return Values

The encoded string.

Examples

Example #1 mb_convert_encoding() example

<?php
/* Convert internal character encoding to SJIS */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "SJIS");


/* Convert EUC-JP to UTF-7 */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-7", "EUC-JP");


/* Auto detect encoding from JIS, eucjp-win, sjis-win, then convert str to UCS-2LE */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UCS-2LE", "JIS, eucjp-win, sjis-win");


/* "auto" is expanded to "ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS" */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "EUC-JP", "auto");
?>

If mb_convert_encoding doesn't work for you, and iconv gives you a headache, you might be interested in this free class I found. It can convert almost any charset to almost any other charset. I think it's wonderful and I wish I had found it earlier. It would have saved me tons of headache.



I use it as a fail-safe, in case mb_convert_encoding is not installed. Download it from http://mikolajj.republika.pl/



This is not my own library, so technically it's not spamming, right? ;)



Hope this helps.

StigC
13-Aug-2008 03:38

For the php-noobs (like me) - working with flash and php.



Here's a simple snippet of code that worked great for me, getting php to show special Danish characters, from a Flash email form:



<?php
// Name Escape
$escName = mb_convert_encoding($_POST["Name"], "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8");


// message escape
$escMessage = mb_convert_encoding($_POST["Message"], "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8");


// Headers.. and so on...
?>

nospam at nihonbunka dot com
15-May-2008 06:51

rodrigo at bb2 dot co dot jp wrote that inconv works better than mb_convert_encoding, I find that when converting from uft8 to shift_jis

$conv_str = mb_convert_encoding($str,$toCS,$fromCS);

works while

$conv_str = iconv($fromCS,$toCS.'//IGNORE',$str);

removes tildes from $str.

katzlbtjunk at hotmail dot com
25-Jan-2008 04:36

Clean a string for use as filename by simply replacing all unwanted characters with underscore (ASCII converts to 7bit). It removes slightly more chars than necessary. Hope its useful.



$fileName = 'Test:!"$%&/()=Ã–Ã„ÃœÃ¶Ã¤Ã¼<<';

echo strtr(mb_convert_encoding($fileName,'ASCII'),

    ' ,;:?*#!Â§$%&/(){}<>=`Â´|\\\'"',

    '____________________________');

rodrigo at bb2 dot co dot jp
15-Jan-2008 03:47

For those who canÂ´t use mb_convert_encoding() to convert from one charset to another as a metter of lower version of php, try iconv().



I had this problem converting to japanese charset:



$txt=mb_convert_encoding($txt,'SJIS',$this->encode);



And I could fix it by using this:



$txt = iconv('UTF-8', 'SJIS', $txt);



Maybe itÂ´s helpfull for someone else! ;)

mightye at gmail dot com
13-Nov-2007 09:24

To petruzanauticoyahoo?com!ar



If you don't specify a source encoding, then it assumes the internal (default) encoding.  Ã± is a multi-byte character whose bytes in your configuration default (often iso-8859-1) would actually mean ÃƒÂ±.  mb_convert_encoding() is upgrading those characters to their multi-byte equivalents within UTF-8.



Try this instead:

<?php
print mb_convert_encoding( "Ã±", "UTF-8", "UTF-8" );
?>
Of course this function does no work (for the most part - it can actually be used to strip characters which are not valid for UTF-8).

volker at machon dot biz
24-Sep-2007 09:05

Hey guys. For everybody who's looking for a function that is converting an iso-string to utf8 or an utf8-string to iso, here's your solution:



public function encodeToUtf8($string) {

     return mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", mb_detect_encoding($string, "UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15", true));

}



public function encodeToIso($string) {

     return mb_convert_encoding($string, "ISO-8859-1", mb_detect_encoding($string, "UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15", true));

}



For me these functions are working fine. Give it a try

aofg
21-Aug-2007 06:49

When converting Japanese strings to ISO-2022-JP or JIS on PHP >= 5.2.1, you can use "ISO-2022-JP-MS" instead of them.

Kishu-Izon (platform dependent) characters are converted correctly with the encoding, as same as with eucJP-win or with SJIS-win.

David Hull
20-Dec-2006 10:52

As an alternative to Johannes's suggestion for converting strings from other character sets to a 7bit representation while not just deleting latin diacritics, you might try this:



<?php

$text = iconv($from_enc, 'US-ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text);
?>


The only disadvantage is that it does not convert "Ã¤" to "ae", but it handles punctuation and other special characters better.

--

David

phpdoc at jeudi dot de
05-Sep-2006 06:46

I'd like to share some code to convert latin diacritics to their

traditional 7bit representation, like, for example,



- Ã ,Ã§,Ã©,Ã®,... to a,c,e,i,...

- ÃŸ to ss

- Ã¤,Ã„,... to ae,Ae,...

- Ã«,... to e,...



(mb_convert "7bit" would simply delete any offending characters).



I might have missed on your country's typographic

conventions--correct me then.

<?php
/**

 * @args string $text line of encoded text

 *       string $from_enc (encoding type of $text, e.g. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1)

 *

 * @returns 7bit representation

 */
function to7bit($text,$from_enc) {

    $text = mb_convert_encoding($text,'HTML-ENTITIES',$from_enc);

    $text = preg_replace(

        array('/&szlig;/','/&(..)lig;/',

             '/&([aouAOU])uml;/','/&(.)[^;]*;/'),

        array('ss',"$1","$1".'e',"$1"),

        $text);

    return $text;

}  
 ?>


Enjoy :-)

Johannes

mac.com@nemo
08-Jul-2006 07:38

For those wanting to convert from $set to MacRoman, use iconv():



<?php



$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'macintosh', $string);


?>


('macintosh' is the IANA name for the MacRoman character set.)

Tom Class
11-Nov-2005 07:35

Why did you use the php html encode functions? mbstring has it's own Encoding which is (as far as I tested it) much more usefull:



HTML-ENTITIES



Example:



$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");

Stephan van der Feest
09-Sep-2005 04:47

To add to the Flash conversion comment below, here's how I convert back from what I've stored in a database after converting from Flash HTML text field output, in order to load it back into a Flash HTML text field:



function htmltoflash($htmlstr)

{

  return str_replace("&lt;br /&gt;","\n",

    str_replace("<","&lt;",

      str_replace(">","&gt;",

        mb_convert_encoding(html_entity_decode($htmlstr),

        "UTF-8","ISO-8859-1"))));

}

Stephan van der Feest
09-Sep-2005 03:50

Here's a tip for anyone using Flash and PHP for storing HTML output submitted from a Flash text field in a database or whatever.



Flash submits its HTML special characters in UTF-8, so you can use the following function to convert those into HTML entity characters:



function utf8html($utf8str)

{

  return htmlentities(mb_convert_encoding($utf8str,"ISO-8859-1","UTF-8"));

}

jamespilcher1 - hotmail
01-Feb-2004 07:55

be careful when converting from iso-8859-1 to utf-8.



even if you explicitly specify the character encoding of a page as iso-8859-1(via headers and strict xml defs), windows 2000 will ignore that and interpret it as whatever character set it has natively installed.



for example, i wrote char #128 into a page, with char encoding iso-8859-1, and it displayed in internet explorer (& mozilla) as a euro symbol.



it should have displayed a box, denoting that char #128 is undefined in iso-8859-1. The problem was it was displaying in "Windows: western europe" (my native character set).



this led to confusion when i tried to convert this euro to UTF-8 via mb_convert_encoding() 



IE displays UTF-8 correctly- and because PHP correctly converted #128 into a box in UTF-8, IE would show a box.



so all i saw was mb_convert_encoding() converting a euro symbol into a box. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on.

lanka at eurocom dot od dot ua
07-Feb-2003 08:03

Another sample of recoding without MultiByte enabling.

(Russian koi->win, if input in win-encoding already, function recode() returns unchanged string)



<?php

  // 0 - win

  // 1 - koi

  function detect_encoding($str) {

    $win = 0;

    $koi = 0;



    for($i=0; $i<strlen($str); $i++) {

      if( ord($str[$i]) >224 && ord($str[$i]) < 255) $win++;

      if( ord($str[$i]) >192 && ord($str[$i]) < 223) $koi++;

    }



    if( $win < $koi ) {

      return 1;

    } else return 0;



  }



  // recodes koi to win

  function koi_to_win($string) {



    $kw = array(128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,  184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 254, 224, 225, 246, 228, 229, 244, 227, 245, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 255, 240, 241, 242, 243, 230, 226, 252, 251, 231, 248, 253, 249, 247, 250, 222, 192, 193, 214, 196, 197, 212, 195, 213, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 223, 208, 209, 210, 211, 198, 194, 220, 219, 199, 216, 221, 217, 215, 218);

    $wk = array(128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,  184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 225, 226, 247, 231, 228, 229, 246, 250, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242,  243, 244, 245, 230, 232, 227, 254, 251, 253, 255, 249, 248, 252, 224, 241, 193, 194, 215, 199, 196, 197, 214, 218, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 198, 200, 195, 222, 219, 221, 223, 217, 216, 220, 192, 209);



    $end = strlen($string);

    $pos = 0;

    do {

      $c = ord($string[$pos]);

      if ($c>128) {

        $string[$pos] = chr($kw[$c-128]);

      }



    } while (++$pos < $end);



    return $string;

  }



  function recode($str) {



    $enc = detect_encoding($str);

    if ($enc==1) {

      $str = koi_to_win($str);

    }



    return $str;

  }
?>

add a note

mb_convert_kana

mb_convert_case