Writing german Umlaut to a text file?

Result is strange Characters like?÷?¸?

[rector]

Hi,
I put german Umlaut like ÄäÖöÜü or ß in a MySQL Database. I read them out via php and they get displayed alright on a webpage.
However if I try to write them to a plain text file (with the fputs-function) for later processing I get those strange characters.

I am using php 4.3.1 and the settings in php.ini are
default_mimetype = "text/html"
default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

Any help is welcome.

[bird]

Whatever software you use for your "later processing" doesn't treat them according to iso-8859-1. Especially on Windows, you may need to convert the binary representation of those characters into some other character set.

[rector]

I use different text editors and also MS Excel to look at the file after writing it from php and it all looks the same, just some strange characters. btw. that's on a Mac running OS X 10.2.4, it works all right on Windows 2000 Professional, but MacOSX is the desired platform.
Any clue on how to convert the characters to another character set?

Thanks in advance.

Helmut

[bird]

Interesting. I'd have expected OS X to use iso-8859-1, not Windows. Maybe they inherited the custom character sets from the old MacOS.

The way to convert this depends on your (programming) language, and I don't have a clue about PHP.

With Python, I'd probably go through Unicode:

text1 = 'Näherungslösung'
utext = unicode(text1, 'iso-8859-1')
text2 = utext.encode('whatever-charset-OS-X-is-using')

Maybe you can figure out something equivalent for PHP... ;)

[LeClair]

Does
htmlentities(string)
help you?
Which makes ä out of ä

[antizwerg]

Mischief just pointed me to:

[php.net ]

to convert into different encodings.

Any idea which encoding and/or locale is used on your mysql server?

[Timotheos]

I think the culprit is the difference in the MAC vs Windows. See [www1.tip.nl...]

So I think your best bet is to go with Unicode. The utf8_encode should be a good function for your needs.

[rector]

Thank you folks,

due to your help I got the problem solved with the preg_replace function

// Character Set change from ISO 8859-1 to Mac-Roman

$find = array("/Ä/","/ä/","/Ö/","/ö/","/Ü/","/ü/","/ß/");
$replace = array(chr(128),chr(138),chr(133),chr(154),chr(134),chr(159),chr(167));
$exportstring = preg_replace($find,$replace,$exportstring);

You were great, especially the link from Timotheos

Thanks again.

Helmut

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:50 pm (utc) on June 28, 2003]
[edit reason] once is enough thanks [/edit]

[Sander]

htmlspecialchars() will do fine too.

it makes a ä -> ä etc.

[LeClair]

htmlspecialchars() will do fine too.

No. You need htmlentities() for that

[rector]

Hi,
neither htmlspecialchars() nor htmlentities changes the characters correctly for output OUTSIDE of html-documents, which is what I needed.
I had to output textfiles for later use as a data source for MS Word Serial-Letters.

Helmut

[ams_david]

something like this maybe?

$txt = ereg_replace ("ä", "ae", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("ö", "oe", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("ü", "ue", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("ß", "ss", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("Ä", "Ae", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("Ö", "Oe", $txt);
$txt = ereg_replace ("Ü", "Ue", $txt);