Problem with specials characters and php

**paldo** · 02-13-2014, 11:24 AM

When my form is filled out with special characters I get a mail with strange characters eventhough I have set the charset to UTF-8. I made a test form as example, if you like to have a try.

Can someone tell me how I can force the form to display the characters correctly?

The problem is in the php script, line 14: (élève / élève) should display the word élève on the mail that I get.

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>test specials characters</title>
</head>

<body>

After filling out this form, a mail will be sent .

<form name="test" action="test1.php"   method="POST">

<div>

    <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
      <tr>
        <td>Enter  
  &eacute;l&egrave;ve<br />
        <input type="text" name="name" size="40" /><br /></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>email<br />
        <input type="text" name="email" size="40" /></td>
      </tr>
      
      <tr>
        <td><input name="submit" type="submit" value=" send " />
          </td>
      </tr>
    </table>

</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

And the reply script:

PHP Code:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<title>Untitled Document</title>

</head>

<body>

<?php 

$email = $_POST['email'];

$name = $_POST['name'];

// Print the message.

print " Thank you, you enter    &eacute;l&egrave;ve";

// Send the email.

$body = " You have enter $name (&eacute;l&egrave;ve / élève), thank you "; 

mail ("$email,mymail@gmail.com", 'test specials characters', $body);

?>

</body>

</html>

**ozinder** · 02-13-2014, 02:47 PM

Originally Posted by paldo

<?php
$email = $_POST['email'];
$name = $_POST['name'];
// Print the message.
print " Thank you, you enter élève";
// Send the email.
$body = " You have enter $name (élève / élève), thank you ";
mail ("$email,mymail@gmail.com", 'test specials characters', $body);
?>

The problem is, you are sending a pure text mail, so the & doesn't have the same meaning as in HTML. You can find a short description on sending an HTML-Mail here: css-tricks.com/sending-nice-html-email-with-php/

Good Luck!

**paldo** · 02-13-2014, 07:59 PM

Thank you Ozinder, very useful link for a better presentation of my text mail . Unfortunately it doesn't solve my problem of special characters. My text mail is in french and in the text I have to use many special characters.

**traq** · 02-13-2014, 08:49 PM

IF you are using utf-8, as you say, then there is no need for encoding those characters. utf-8 supports all these chartacters natively. How are you setting the character encoding?

**paldo** · 02-13-2014, 09:10 PM

I have learned that if I'm using special characters I have to set the charset to utf-8. Doing so, my php form print the characters correctly on the browser, parse the value with special characters also correctly on the mail that I receive but the text containing special characters that I have add to the mail are not displayed correctly. I think that my php form is confused when the $name contain a special character. In fact if the entered word $name doesn't contain a special character, my mail is displayed correctly.

**traq** · 02-14-2014, 05:07 AM

You need to be sure that the php script, the output html (the "webpage" itself) and the email are all encoded with, and declared as, utf-8.

In general, browsers encode form submissions with whatever encoding the webpage was sent in, so that's your first step. Note that many web hosts automatically send a charset declaration for you, and it's not always utf-8 (some version of ISO-8859 is very common).

Setting the charset in your HTML markup is not sufficient in most cases ([almost?] all browsers will ignore the html charset if the server sends a content-type header). If the browser is unsure about what character encoding to use, many (especially IE) will try to auto-detect it by reading the first few hundred bytes or so: because this is probably all in the <head> section of your page, it will all probably be standard latin characters (which are the same in ASCII and UTF-8, and therefore indistinguishable).

The same points apply to the email itself: make sure your php script is encoded with utf-8, and make sure to specify the charset as utf-8.

**ozinder** · 02-14-2014, 07:27 AM

Originally Posted by paldo

My text mail is in french and in the text I have to use many special characters.

Perhaps I missunderstand: Do you send a text mail or a HTML-Mail?

If you use HTML, you will perhaps need to replace the special chars entered in the form with their ampersand representation in HTML.
If you use UTF-8 in your form, your strings and your mail, you will need

Code:

Content-Type:text/plain;charset=utf-8

in your mail-header.

Perhaps this one helps you a step along.

**paldo** · 02-14-2014, 09:16 PM

I'm stuck, no improvement. I have change the form a little bit so that you can test if you wish.
http://www.anti-aging-solutions.ch/j...est/test1.html

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>test specials characters</title>
</head>

<body>

After filling out this form, a mail will be sent to you . Try first by filling out with a word not containing a special character, and then another mail containing a special character. You will see that in the first mail my plain text that contain special character will display correctly, but not in the second mail. <br/><br/> 

<form name="test" action="test1.php"   method="POST">

<div>

    <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
      <tr>
        <td>Enter for example eleve in the first mail and   
  &eacute;l&egrave;ve in the second<br />
        <input type="text" name="name" size="40" /><br /></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>email<br />
        <input type="text" name="email" size="40" /></td>
      </tr>
      
      <tr>
        <td><input name="submit" type="submit" value=" send " />
          </td>
      </tr>
    </table>

</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

And the php script:

PHP Code:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<title>Untitled Document</title>

</head>

<body>

<?php 

$email = $_POST['email'];

$name = $_POST['name'];





// Print the message.

print " Thank you, you enter    &eacute;l&egrave;ve";





// Send the email.

$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";

$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n";

$message .= " You have enter $name (élève), thank you ";

            

 

mail ("$email", 'test specials characters', $message, $headers);

?>

</body>

</html>



Thanks for your help.

**traq** · 02-14-2014, 09:27 PM

First, your test page is not declared as UTF-8.

Originally Posted by http://www.anti-aging-solutions.ch/jeunesse/test/test1.html

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

See my post above. You need to send an HTTP header with the correct charset: the charset in your html markup will not be sufficient.

Your code that send the email looks correct, except that the first header line should be assigned, not appended:

PHP Code:


#  NO
# $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";

# Yes
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";

**paldo** · 02-14-2014, 09:46 PM

You mean the form page (../test1.html) is not declared UTF-8? Is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> not the correct declaration? What else and where do I have to declare? Thanks