iconv

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.5, PHP 5, PHP 7)

iconv — Convert string to requested character encoding

Description

string iconv ( string $in_charset , string $out_charset , string $str )

Performs a character set conversion on the string str from in_charset to out_charset.

Parameters

in_charset

The input charset.

out_charset

The output charset.

If you append the string //TRANSLIT to out_charset transliteration is activated. This means that when a character can't be represented in the target charset, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. If you append the string //IGNORE, characters that cannot be represented in the target charset are silently discarded. Otherwise, E_NOTICE is generated and the function will return FALSE.

str

The string to be converted.

Return Values

Returns the converted string or FALSE on failure.

Changelog

Version	Description
5.4.0	Since this version, the function returns `FALSE` on illegal characters, unless //IGNORE is specified in output charset. Before, it returned partial output string.

Examples

Example #1 iconv() example


<?php
$text = "This is the Euro symbol '€'.";

echo 'Original : ', $text, PHP_EOL;
echo 'TRANSLIT : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'IGNORE   : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'Plain    : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $text), PHP_EOL;

?>

The above example will output something similar to:

Original : This is the Euro symbol '€'.
TRANSLIT : This is the Euro symbol 'EUR'.
IGNORE   : This is the Euro symbol ''.
Plain    :
Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in .\iconv-example.php on line 7

User Contributed Notes

orrd101 at gmail dot com

3 years ago


The "//ignore" option doesn't work with recent versions of the iconv library.  So if you're having trouble with that option, you aren't alone.  



That means you can't currently use this function to filter invalid characters.  Instead it silently fails and returns an empty string (or you'll get a notice but only if you have E_NOTICE enabled).



This has been a known bug with a known solution for at least since 2009 years but no one seems to be willing to fix it (PHP must pass the -c option to iconv).  It's still broken as of the latest release 5.4.3. 



https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48147

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52211

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61484



[UPDATE 15-JUN-2012]

Here's a workaround...



  ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none");

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



That will strip invalid characters from UTF-8 strings (so that you can insert it into a database, etc.).  Instead of "none" you can also use the value 32 if you want it to insert spaces in place of the invalid characters.

Ritchie

9 years ago


Please note that iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', ...) doesn't work properly when locale category LC_CTYPE is set to C or POSIX. You must choose another locale otherwise all non-ASCII characters will be replaced with question marks. This is at least true with glibc 2.5.

Example:
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'POSIX');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
// ?lu?ou?k? k??

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
// Zlutoucky kun
?>

daniel dot rhodes at warpasylum dot co dot uk

4 years ago


Interestingly, setting different target locales results in different, yet appropriate, transliterations. For example:

<?php
//some German
$utf8_sentence = 'Weiß, Goldmann, Göbel, Weiss, Göthe, Goethe und Götz';

//UK
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB');

//transliterate
$trans_sentence = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $utf8_sentence);

//gives [Weiss, Goldmann, Gobel, Weiss, Gothe, Goethe und Gotz]
//which is our original string flattened into 7-bit ASCII as
//an English speaker would do it (ie. simply remove the umlauts)
echo $trans_sentence . PHP_EOL;

//Germany
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE');

$trans_sentence = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $utf8_sentence);

//gives [Weiss, Goldmann, Goebel, Weiss, Goethe, Goethe und Goetz]
//which is exactly how a German would transliterate those
//umlauted characters if forced to use 7-bit ASCII!
//(because really ä = ae, ö = oe and ü = ue)
echo $trans_sentence . PHP_EOL;

?>

annuaireehtp at gmail dot com

6 years ago


to test different combinations of convertions between charsets (when we don't know the source charset and what is the convenient destination charset) this is an example :



<?php

$tab = array("UTF-8", "ASCII", "Windows-1252", "ISO-8859-15", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-6", "CP1256");

$chain = "";

foreach ($tab as $i)

    {

        foreach ($tab as $j)

        {

            $chain .= " $i$j ".iconv($i, $j, "$my_string");

        }

    }



echo $chain;

?>



then after displaying, you use the $i$j that shows good displaying.

NB: you can add other charsets to $tab  to test other cases.

atelier at degoy dot com

1 year ago


There may be situations when a new version of a web site, all in UTF-8, has to display some old data remaining in the database with ISO-8859-1 accents. The problem is iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $string) should not be applied if $string is already UTF-8 encoded.

I use this function that does'nt need any extension :

function convert_utf8( $string ) { 
    if ( strlen(utf8_decode($string)) == strlen($string) ) {   
        // $string is not UTF-8
        return iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $string);
    } else {
        // already UTF-8
        return $string;
    }
}

 I have not tested it extensively, hope it may help.

Leigh Morresi

7 years ago


If you are getting question-marks in your iconv output when transliterating, be sure to 'setlocale' to something your system supports.

Some PHP CMS's will default setlocale to 'C', this can be a problem.

use the "locale" command to find out a list..

$ locale -a
C
en_AU.utf8
POSIX

<?php
  setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_AU.utf8');
  $str = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Côte d'Ivoire");
?>

ng4rrjanbiah at rediffmail dot com

11 years ago


Here is a code to convert ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 and vice versa without using iconv.

<?php
//Logic from http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/InternationalisationUTF8
$str_iso8859_1 = 'foo in ISO 8859-1';
//ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
$str_utf8 = preg_replace("/([\x80-\xFF])/e", 
            "chr(0xC0|ord('\\1')>>6).chr(0x80|ord('\\1')&0x3F)",
             $str_iso8859_1);
//UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1
$str_iso8859_1 = preg_replace("/([\xC2\xC3])([\x80-\xBF])/e", 
                "chr(ord('\\1')<<6&0xC0|ord('\\2')&0x3F)",
                 $str_utf8);
?>

HTH,
R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah

Nopius

1 year ago


As orrd101 said, there is a bug with //IGNORE in recent PHP versions (we use 5.6.5) where we couldn't convert some strings (i.e. "∙" from UTF8 to CP1251 with //IGNORE). 
But we have found a workaround and now we use both //TRANSLIT and //IGNORE flags:
$text="∙";
iconv("UTF8", "CP1251//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", $text);

gree:.. (gree 4T grees D0T net)

8 years ago


In my case, I had to change:
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
?>
to 
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ.UTF-8');
?>
Otherwise it returns question marks.

When I asked my linux for locale (by locale command) it returns "cs_CZ.UTF-8", so there is maybe correlation between it.

iconv (GNU libc) 2.6.1
glibc 2.3.6

jessiedeer at hotmail dot com

2 years ago


iconv with //IGNORE works as expected: it will skip the character if this one does not exist in the $out_charset encoding.

If a character is missing from the $in_charset encoding (eg byte \x81 from CP1252 encoding), then iconv will return an error, whether with //IGNORE or not.

Daniel Klein

3 years ago


You can use 'CP1252' instead of 'Windows-1252':
<?php
// These two lines are equivalent
$result = iconv('Windows-1252', 'UTF-8', $string);
$result = iconv('CP1252', 'UTF-8', $string);
?>
Note: The following code points are not valid in CP1252 and will cause errors.
129 (0x81)
141 (0x8D)
143 (0x8F)
144 (0x90)
157 (0x9D)
Use the following instead:
<?php
// Remove invalid code points, convert everything else
$result = iconv('CP1252', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $string);
?>

berserk220 at mail dot ru

8 years ago


So, as iconv() does not always work correctly, in most cases, much easier to use htmlentities(). 
Example: <?php $content=htmlentities(file_get_contents("incoming.txt"), ENT_QUOTES, "Windows-1252");  file_put_contents("outbound.txt", html_entity_decode($content, ENT_QUOTES , "utf-8")); ?>

zhawari at hotmail dot com

11 years ago


Here is how to convert UCS-2 numbers to UTF-8 numbers in hex:



<?php

function ucs2toutf8($str)

{

        for ($i=0;$i<strlen($str);$i+=4)

        {

                $substring1 = $str[$i].$str[$i+1];

                $substring2 = $str[$i+2].$str[$i+3];

 

                if ($substring1 == "00")

                {

                        $byte1 = "";

                        $byte2 = $substring2;

                }

                else

                {

                        $substring = $substring1.$substring2;

                        $byte1 = dechex(192+(hexdec($substring)/64));

                        $byte2 = dechex(128+(hexdec($substring)%64));

                }

                $utf8 .= $byte1.$byte2;

        }

        return $utf8;

}

 

echo strtoupper(ucs2toutf8("06450631062D0020"));



?>



Input:

06450631062D

Output:

D985D8B1D8AD



regards,

Ziyad

manuel at kiessling dot net

7 years ago


Like many other people, I have encountered massive problems when using iconv() to convert between encodings (from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15 in my case), especially on large strings.

The main problem here is that when your string contains illegal UTF-8 characters, there is no really straight forward way to handle those. iconv() simply (and silently!) terminates the string when encountering the problematic characters (also if using //IGNORE), returning a clipped string. The

<?php

$newstring = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($oldstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');

?>

workaround suggested here and elsewhere will also break when encountering illegal characters, at least dropping a useful note ("htmlentities(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in...")

I have found a lot of hints, suggestions and alternative methods (it's scary and in my opinion no good sign how many ways PHP natively provides to convert the encoding of strings), but none of them really worked, except for this one:

<?php

$newstring = mb_convert_encoding($oldstring, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');

?>

miloshio at gmail dot com

3 years ago


Please keep in mind that iconv is not your magic stick by which you can convert anything to your desired encoding sheme.

Even if there is encoding declaration for text you're about to manipulate in PHP, there is always chances that there are some characters or character sequences that are in wrong encoding scheme and despite that your browser (for example) is displaying text to you properly.

These are situations with so-called mixed encoding. You have to:

detect current encoding for your string,

repair broken encoding sheme (here I'm struggling with different methods and third-party libraries such as forceutf8 on GitHub),

and in last step you can hope to good conversion results.

kikke

7 years ago


You can use native iconv in Linux via passthru if all else failed.
Use the -c parameter to suppress error messages.

ameten

5 years ago


I have used iconv to convert from cp1251 into UTF-8. I spent a day to investigate why a string with Russian capital 'Р' (sounds similar to 'r') at the end cannot be inserted into a database.

The problem is not in iconv. But 'Р' in cp1251 is chr(208) and 'Р' in UTF-8 is chr(208).chr(106). chr(106) is one of the space symbol which match '\s' in regex. So, it can be taken by a greedy '+' or '*' operator. In that case, you loose 'Р' in your string.

For example, 'ГР   ' (Russian, UTF-8). Function preg_match. Regex is '(.+?)[\s]*'. Then '(.+?)' matches 'Г'.chr(208) and '[\s]*' matches chr(106).'   '.

Although, it is not a bug of iconv, but it looks like it very much. That's why I put this comment here.

nilcolor at gmail dot coom

10 years ago


Didn't know its a feature or not but its works for me (PHP 5.0.4)

iconv('', 'UTF-8', $str)

test it to convert from windows-1251 (stored in DB) to UTF-8 (which i use for web pages).
BTW i convert each array i fetch from DB with array_walk_recursive...

anton dot vakulchik at gmail dot com

8 years ago


function detectUTF8($string)
{
        return preg_match('%(?:
        [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]        # non-overlong 2-byte
        |\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]               # excluding overlongs
        |[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}      # straight 3-byte
        |\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]               # excluding surrogates
        |\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}    # planes 1-3
        |[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}                  # planes 4-15
        |\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}    # plane 16
        )+%xs', $string);
}

function cp1251_utf8( $sInput )
{
    $sOutput = "";

    for ( $i = 0; $i < strlen( $sInput ); $i++ )
    {
        $iAscii = ord( $sInput[$i] );

        if ( $iAscii >= 192 && $iAscii <= 255 )
            $sOutput .=  "&#".( 1040 + ( $iAscii - 192 ) ).";";
        else if ( $iAscii == 168 )
            $sOutput .= "&#".( 1025 ).";";
        else if ( $iAscii == 184 )
            $sOutput .= "&#".( 1105 ).";";
        else
            $sOutput .= $sInput[$i];
    }
    
    return $sOutput;
}

function encoding($string){
    if (function_exists('iconv')) {    
        if (@!iconv('utf-8', 'cp1251', $string)) {
            $string = iconv('cp1251', 'utf-8', $string);
        }
        return $string;
    } else {
        if (detectUTF8($string)) {
            return $string;        
        } else {
            return cp1251_utf8($string);
        }
    }
}
echo encoding($string);

zhawari at hotmail dot com

11 years ago


Here is how to convert UTF-8 numbers to UCS-2 numbers in hex:

<?php
 
function utf8toucs2($str)
{
       for ($i=0;$i<strlen($str);$i+=2)
       {
                $substring1 = $str[$i].$str[$i+1];  
                $substring2 = $str[$i+2].$str[$i+3]; 
               
                if (hexdec($substring1) < 127)
                        $results = "00".$str[$i].$str[$i+1];
                else
                {
                        $results = dechex((hexdec($substring1)-192)*64 + (hexdec($substring2)-128));
                        if ($results < 1000) $results = "0".$results; 
                        $i+=2;
                }
                $ucs2 .= $results;
        }
        return $ucs2;
}
 
echo strtoupper(utf8toucs2("D985D8B1D8AD"))."\n";
echo strtoupper(utf8toucs2("456725"))."\n";
 
?>

Input:
D985D8B1D8AD
Output:
06450631062D

Input:
456725
Output:
004500670025

vitek at 4rome dot ru

11 years ago


On some systems there may be no such function as iconv(); this is due to the following reason: a constant is defined named `iconv` with the value `libiconv`. So, the string PHP_FUNCTION(iconv) transforms to PHP_FUNCTION(libiconv), and you have to call libiconv() function instead of iconv().
I had seen this on FreeBSD, but I am sure that was a rather special build.
If you'd want not to be dependent on this behaviour, add the following to your script:
<?php
if (!function_exists('iconv') && function_exists('libiconv')) {
    function iconv($input_encoding, $output_encoding, $string) {
        return libiconv($input_encoding, $output_encoding, $string);
    }
}
?>
Thanks to tony2001 at phpclub.net for explaining this behaviour.

phpmanualspam at netebb dot com

6 years ago


mirek code, dated 16-May-2008 10:17, added the characters `^~'" to the output.
This function will strip out these extra characters:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function clearUTF($s)
{
    $r = '';
    $s1 = @iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $s);
    $j = 0;
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($s1); $i++) {
        $ch1 = $s1[$i];
        $ch2 = @mb_substr($s, $j++, 1, 'UTF-8');
        if (strstr('`^~\'"', $ch1) !== false) {
            if ($ch1 <> $ch2) {
                --$j;
                continue;
            }
        }
        $r .= ($ch1=='?') ? $ch2 : $ch1;
    }
    return $r;
}
?>

Georgios Papadakis

9 years ago


Many mail servers don't handle utf-8 correctly as they assume iso-8859-x encodings, so you would want to convert the headers, subject and body of an email prior to sending it out.

If iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() are missing the following function can be used to convert UTF8 to iso-8859-7 encoding. It discards all characters that are not 2-byte greek characters or single-byte (ascii).

<?php
function conv_utf8_iso8859_7($s) {
    $len = strlen($s);
    $out = "";
    $curr_char = "";
    for($i=0; $i < $len; $i++) {
        $curr_char .= $s[$i];
        if( ( ord($s[$i]) & (128+64) ) == 128) {
            //character end found
            if ( strlen($curr_char) == 2) {
                // 2-byte character check for it is greek one and convert
                if      (ord($curr_char[0])==205) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+16 );
                else if (ord($curr_char[0])==206) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+48 );
                else if (ord($curr_char[0])==207) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+112 );
                else ; // non greek 2-byte character, discard character
            } else ;// n-byte character, n>2, discard character
            $curr_char = "";
        } else if (ord($s[$i]) < 128) {
            // character is one byte (ascii)
            $out .= $curr_char;
            $curr_char = "";
        }
    }
    return $out;
}
?>

Locoluis

9 years ago


The following are Microsoft encodings that are based on ISO-8859 but with the addition of those stupid control characters.

CP1250 is Eastern European (not ISO-8859-2)
CP1251 is Cyrillic (not ISO-8859-5)
CP1252 is Western European (not ISO-8859-1)
CP1253 is Greek (not ISO-8859-7)
CP1254 is Turkish (not ISO-8859-9)
CP1255 is Hebrew (not ISO-8859-8)
CP1256 is Arabic (not ISO-8859-6)
CP1257 is Baltic (not ISO-8859-4)

If you know you're getting input from a Windows machine with those encodings, use one of these as a parameter to iconv.

anyean at gmail dot com

10 years ago


<?php
//script from http://zizi.kxup.com/
//javascript unesape
function unescape($str) {
  $str = rawurldecode($str);
  preg_match_all("/(?:%u.{4})|&#x.{4};|&#\d+;|.+/U",$str,$r);
  $ar = $r[0];
print_r($ar);
  foreach($ar as $k=>$v) {
    if(substr($v,0,2) == "%u")
      $ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("H4",substr($v,-4)));
    elseif(substr($v,0,3) == "&#x")
      $ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("H4",substr($v,3,-1)));
    elseif(substr($v,0,2) == "&#") {
echo substr($v,2,-1)."<br>";
      $ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("n",substr($v,2,-1)));
    }
  }
  return join("",$ar);
}
?>

nikolai-dot-zujev-at-gmail-dot-com

11 years ago


Here is an example how to convert windows-1251 (windows) or cp1251(Linux/Unix) encoded string to UTF-8 encoding.

<?php
function cp1251_utf8( $sInput )
{
    $sOutput = "";

    for ( $i = 0; $i < strlen( $sInput ); $i++ )
    {
        $iAscii = ord( $sInput[$i] );

        if ( $iAscii >= 192 && $iAscii <= 255 )
            $sOutput .=  "&#".( 1040 + ( $iAscii - 192 ) ).";";
        else if ( $iAscii == 168 )
            $sOutput .= "&#".( 1025 ).";";
        else if ( $iAscii == 184 )
            $sOutput .= "&#".( 1105 ).";";
        else
            $sOutput .= $sInput[$i];
    }
    
    return $sOutput;
}
?>

vb (at) bertola.eu

5 years ago


On my system, according to tests, and also as reported by other people elsewhere, you can combine TRANSLIT and IGNORE only by appending

//IGNORE//TRANSLIT

strictly in that order, but NOT by appending //TRANSLIT//IGNORE, which would lead to //IGNORE being ignored ( :) ).

Anyway, it's hard to understand how one could devise a system of passing options that does not allow to couple both options in a neat manner, and also to understand why the default behaviour should be the less useful and most dangerous one (throwing away most of your data at the first unexpected character). Software design FAIL :-/

jessie at hotmail dot com

2 years ago


Provided that there is no invalid code point in the character chain for the input encoding, the //IGNORE option works as expected. No bug here.

admin at iecw dot net

3 years ago


If you want to normalize a filename on Mac OS X, because it is in UTF-8 NFD and you need UTF-8 NFC
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Combining_and_precomposed_characters)
you may use:
<?php
$filename_nfc = iconv("UTF-8-MAC", "UTF-8", $filename_nfd);
?>

Anonymous

6 years ago


For text with special characters such as (é) &eacute; which appears at 0xE9 in the ISO-8859-1 and at 0x82 in IBM-850. The correct output character set is 'IBM850' as:
('ISO-8859-1', 'IBM850', 'Québec')

martin at front of mind dot co dot uk

6 years ago


For transcoding values in an Excel generated CSV the following seems to work:

<?php 
$value = iconv('Windows-1252', 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $value);
?>

info at ozanakman dot com dot tr

3 years ago


Turkish characters is error with the used set_locale and strftime commands.

My key example:
<?php iconv('','UTF-8',strftime('%d %B %Y %A')); ?>

mightye at gmail dot com

8 years ago


To strip bogus characters from your input (such as data from an unsanitized or other source which you can't trust to necessarily give you strings encoded according to their advertised encoding set), use the same character set as both the input and the output, with //IGNORE on the output charcter set.
<?php
// assuming '†' is actually UTF8, htmlentities will assume it's iso-8859  
// since we did not specify in the 3rd argument of htmlentities.
// This generates "&acirc;[bad utf-8 character]"
// If passed to any libxml, it will generate a fatal error.
$badUTF8 = htmlentities('†');

// iconv() can ignore characters which cannot be encoded in the target character set
$goodUTF8 = iconv("utf-8", "utf-8//IGNORE", $badUTF8);
?>
The result of the example does not give you back the dagger character which was the original input (it got lost when htmlentities was misused to encode it incorrectly, though this is common from people not accustomed to dealing with extended character sets), but it does at least give you data which is sane in your target character set.

dead dot screamer at seznam dot cz

8 years ago


Ritchie's example

<?
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
?>

dasn't output `Zlutoucky kun`, but `Zlutouck'y kun`

SiMM

11 years ago


<?php // it's only example

function CP1251toUTF8($string){

  $out = '';

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

    $ch = ord($string{$i});

    if ($ch < 0x80) $out .= chr($ch);

    else

      if ($ch >= 0xC0)

        if ($ch < 0xF0)

             $out .= "\xD0".chr(0x90 + $ch - 0xC0); // &#1040;-&#1071;, &#1072;-&#1087; (A-YA, a-p)

        else $out .= "\xD1".chr(0x80 + $ch - 0xF0); // &#1088;-&#1103; (r-ya)

      else

        switch($ch){

          case 0xA8: $out .= "\xD0\x81"; break; // YO

          case 0xB8: $out .= "\xD1\x91"; break; // yo

          // ukrainian

          case 0xA1: $out .= "\xD0\x8E"; break; // &#1038; (U)

          case 0xA2: $out .= "\xD1\x9E"; break; // &#1118; (u)

          case 0xAA: $out .= "\xD0\x84"; break; // &#1028; (e)

          case 0xAF: $out .= "\xD0\x87"; break; // &#1031; (I..)

          case 0xB2: $out .= "\xD0\x86"; break; // I (I)

          case 0xB3: $out .= "\xD1\x96"; break; // i (i)

          case 0xBA: $out .= "\xD1\x94"; break; // &#1108; (e)

          case 0xBF: $out .= "\xD1\x97"; break; // &#1111; (i..)

          // chuvashian

          case 0x8C: $out .= "\xD3\x90"; break; // &#1232; (A)

          case 0x8D: $out .= "\xD3\x96"; break; // &#1238; (E)

          case 0x8E: $out .= "\xD2\xAA"; break; // &#1194; (SCH)

          case 0x8F: $out .= "\xD3\xB2"; break; // &#1266; (U)

          case 0x9C: $out .= "\xD3\x91"; break; // &#1233; (a)

          case 0x9D: $out .= "\xD3\x97"; break; // &#1239; (e)

          case 0x9E: $out .= "\xD2\xAB"; break; // &#1195; (sch)

          case 0x9F: $out .= "\xD3\xB3"; break; // &#1267; (u)

        }

  }

  return $out;

}

?>

PHANTOm <phantom at nix dot co dot il>

11 years ago


convert windows-1255 to utf-8 with the following code
<?php
$heb = 'put hebrew text here';
$utf = preg_replace("/([\xE0-\xFA])/e","chr(215).chr(ord(\${1})-80)",$heb);
?>

sire at acc dot umu dot se

10 years ago


If you get this error message: "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in file.php on line x", and your text or database is likely to contain text copied from Microsoft Word documents, it's very likely that the error is because of the evil 0x96 "long dash" character. MS Word as default converts all double hyphens into this illegal character. The solution is either to convert 0x96 (dash) into the regular 0x2d (hyphen/minus), or to append the //TRANSLIT or //IGNORE parameters (se above).

rasmus at mindplay dot dk

1 year ago


Note an important difference between iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() - if you're working with strings, as opposed to files, you most likely want mb_convert_encoding() and not iconv(), because iconv() will add a byte-order marker to the beginning of (for example) a UTF-32 string when converting from e.g. ISO-8859-1, which can throw off all your subsequent calculations and operations on the resulting string.

In other words, iconv() appears to be intended for use when converting the contents of files - whereas mb_convert_encoding() is intended for use when juggling strings internally, e.g. strings that aren't being read/written to/from files, but exchanged with some other media.

Daniel Klein

23 days ago


I just found out today that the Windows and *NIX versions of PHP use different iconv libraries and are not very consistent with each other.

Here is a repost of my earlier code that now works on more systems. It converts as much as possible and replaces the rest with question marks:

<?php
if (!function_exists('utf8_to_ascii')) {
  setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_AU.utf8');
  if (@iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", 'é') === false) {
    // PHP is probably using the glibc library (*NIX)
    function utf8_to_ascii($text) {
      return iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);
    }
  }
  else {
    // PHP is probably using the libiconv library (Windows)
    function utf8_to_ascii($text) {
      if (is_string($text)) {
        // Includes combinations of characters that present as a single glyph
        $text = preg_replace_callback('/\X/u', __FUNCTION__, $text);
      }
      elseif (is_array($text) && count($text) == 1 && is_string($text[0])) {
        // IGNORE characters that can't be TRANSLITerated to ASCII
        $text = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", $text[0]);
        // The documentation says that iconv() returns false on failure but it returns ''
        if ($text === '' || !is_string($text)) {
          $text = '?';
        }
        elseif (preg_match('/\w/', $text)) {        // If the text contains any letters...
          $text = preg_replace('/\W+/', '', $text); // ...then remove all non-letters
        }
      }
      else {  // $text was not a string
        $text = '';
      }
      return $text;
    }
  }
}

Bas Vijfwinkel

11 months ago


You can use iconv in order to access filenames or paths that containt Japanese (and probably also Koreans and Chinese) characters that would normally not be processed correctly by 'copy', 'fopen', 'rename', etc...

<?PHP

function convertPath($path)
{
    //split networkpath into parts
    $parts = explode('\\',$path);
    // convert each part to SJIS
    foreach($parts as $index => $part)
    {
         $parts[$index] = iconv('UTF-8','SJIS//IGNORE',$part);
    }    
    // put the network path back together 
    return implode('\\',$parts);
}

$oldname = convertPath('c:/Temp/ほげほげ.pdf');
$newname  = convertPath('\\\\PFSV0100\\DATA\\06：個人別\\333328_ほげほげ\\test_あいうえお.pdf');

copy($oldname, $newname);
?>

Note that there are some characters which do not have a SJIS equivalent like '②'.
They will be omitted by iconv without any error or warning.

chicopeste at gmail dot com

2 years ago


iconv also support CP850.
I used iconv("CP850", "UTF-8//TRANSLIT", $var);
to convert from SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_CI_AI to UTF-8.

jorortega at gmail dot com

2 years ago


Be aware that iconv in PHP uses system implementations of locales and languages, what works under linux, normally doesn't in windows.

Also, you may notice that recent versions of linux (debian, ubuntu, centos, etc) the //TRANSLIT option doesn't work. since most distros doesn't include the intl packages (example: php5-intl and icuxx (where xx is a number) in debian) by default. And this because the intl package conflicts with another package needed for international DNS resolution.

Problem is that configuration is dependent of the sysadmin of the machine where you're hosted, so iconv is pretty much useless by default,  depending on what configuration is used by your distro or the machine's admin.

jessie at hotmail dot com

2 years ago


Provided that there is no invalid code point in the character chain for the input encoding, the //IGNORE option works as expected. No bug here.

aissam at yahoo dot com

11 years ago


For those who have troubles in displaying UCS-2 data on browser, here's a simple function that convert ucs2 to html unicode entities :

<?php

 function ucs2html($str) {
    $str=trim($str); // if you are reading from file
    $len=strlen($str);
    $html='';
    for($i=0;$i<$len;$i+=2)
        $html.='&#'.hexdec(dechex(ord($str[$i+1])).
                   sprintf("%02s",dechex(ord($str[$i])))).';';
    return($html);
 }
?>

Andries Seutens

6 years ago


When doing transliteration, you have to make sure that your LC_COLLATE is properly set, otherwise the default POSIX will be used.

To transform "rené" into "rene" we could use the following code snippet:

<?php

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'nl_BE.utf8');

$string = 'rené';
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);

echo $string; // outputs rene

?>

admin at studio-gepard dot pl

7 years ago


I noticed that iconv might return not entire string, and no error. It happens when iconv encounters characters it doesn't know how to convert to certain encoding.
Simplest way to check how it works is:
<?php
$text=iconv('utf-8','iso-8859-2',$text);
$text=iconv('utf-8','iso-8859-2',$text);
?>
the result will be $text till first encounter of iso-8859-2 -specific char (such as ą / ź which already was converted to ± / Ľ ). It's quite hard to catch this error and brings a lot of trouble. I got it with converting greek alpha into iso-8859-2 (should be &alpha; but causes the error)

mirek at burkon dot org

7 years ago


If you need to strip as many national characters from UTF-8 as possible and keep the rest of input unchanged (i.e. convert whatever can be converted to ASCII and leave the rest), you can do it like this:

<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');

function clearUTF($s)
{
    $r = '';
    $s1 = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $s);
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($s1); $i++)
    {
        $ch1 = $s1[$i];
        $ch2 = mb_substr($s, $i, 1);

        $r .= $ch1=='?'?$ch2:$ch1;
    }
    return $r;
}

echo clearUTF('Šíleně žluťoučký Vašek úpěl olol! This will remain untranslated: ᾡᾧῘઍિ૮');
//outputs Silene zlutoucky Vasek upel olol! This will remain untranslated: ᾡᾧῘઍિ૮
?>

Just remember you HAVE TO set locale to some unicode encoding to make iconv handle //TRANSLIT correctly!

wulf dot kaiser at mpimf-heidelberg dot mpg dot de

7 years ago


Here a very small but useful way to handle text files before further using them:

<?php

$in = file("/tmp/myfile.txt");
$out = fopen("/tmp/myfile.txt", "w");

foreach ($in as $line) {

  fputs($out, iconv("UTF-8","ISO-8859-1", $line));}

?>

hello at luka dot io

3 years ago


yet another "fix my horrible data" function, this one should convert windows-1250 entities into iso-8859-2, ready to be iconv()ed into utf8

to be applied when converting the entire thing from windows-1250 doesn't work

<?php

function w1250_to_iso88592($text) {
    // map based on http://konfiguracja.c0.pl/iso02vscp1250en.html

    $map = array(
        chr(0x8A) => chr(0xA9),
        chr(0x8C) => chr(0xA6),
        chr(0x8D) => chr(0xAB),
        chr(0x8E) => chr(0xAE),
        chr(0x8F) => chr(0xAC),
        chr(0x9C) => chr(0xB6),
        chr(0x9D) => chr(0xBB),
        chr(0xA1) => chr(0xB7),
        chr(0xA5) => chr(0xA1),
        chr(0xBC) => chr(0xA5),
        chr(0x9F) => chr(0xBC),
        chr(0xB9) => chr(0xB1),
        chr(0x9A) => chr(0xB9),
        chr(0xBE) => chr(0xB5),
        chr(0x9E) => chr(0xBE),
    );

    return strtr($text, $map);
}

?>

slogic

1 year ago


Valid cyrillic OEM codepage name is "cp866".

Daniel Klein

2 years ago


A function to convert UTF-8 to best-fit ASCII. Handles punctuation too. Characters it doesn't understand get converted to '?'.

<?php
function utf8_to_ascii($text) {
    if (is_string($text)) {
        // Includes combinations of characters that present as a single glyph
        $text = preg_replace_callback('/\X/u', __FUNCTION__, $text);
    }
    elseif (is_array($text) && count($text) == 1 && is_string($text[0])) {
        // IGNORE characters that can't be TRANSLITerated to ASCII
        $text = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", $text[0]);
        // The documentation says that iconv() returns false on failure but it returns ''
        if ($text === '' || !is_string($text)) {
            $text = '?';
        }
        elseif (preg_match('/\w/', $text)) {            // If the text contains any letters...
            $text = preg_replace('/\W+/', '', $text);   // ...then remove all non-letters
        }
    }
    else {  // $text was not a string
        $text = '';
    }
    return $text;
}

$text = 'Française señor café 0123 කොහොමද ශ්‍රී ලංකා  hello Žluťoučký kůň '
. 'ÀÁÂ,ÃÄÅ,Æ,ÇÈ,ÉÊË,ÌÍÎ,ÏÐÑ,ÒÓÔ,ÕÖØ,ÙÚÛ,ÜÝ,Þ,'
. 'ß,àáâ,ãäå,æ,çèé,êëì,íîï,ðñò,óôõ,öøù,úûýý,þ,ÿŔŕ '
. 'YA(亚） HE（何） Tra Mỹ';
print(utf8_to_ascii($text));
/* prints
Francaise senor cafe 0123 ???? ?? ?? hello Zlutoucky kun 
AAA,AAA,AE,CE,EEE,III,IDN,OOO,OOO,UUU,UY,Th,
ss,aaa,aaa,ae,cee,eei,iii,dno,ooo,oou,uuyy,th,yRr 
YA(?) HE(?) Tra My
*/
?>

marc at NOSPAM dot leftek dot com

4 years ago


A simple cleaning function [eg: iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE", $s)] may not be enough when receiving UTF8 input that needs to be saved in MySQL.  Prior to MySQL v5.5 four byte sequences were not supported so a function is needed to strip these out as well:

<?php
            for($pos=strlen($strUtf8)-1; $pos >= 0 ; $pos--){
                $char = substr($strUtf8, $pos, 1);
                if (ord($char) > 0xEF) $strUtf8 = substr($strUtf8, 0, $pos).substr($strUtf8, $pos+1); 
            }
?>