Detect charset of string in PHP (UTF-8 or Windows-1256)

Question

I'm working on script based on "Simple HTML DOM" and I want to detect string's charset after getting inner text of URL to convert it to "UTF-8" using `iconv()`. I've tried a lot of things but non of them work with `Windows-1256`. What I've tried:- `mb_detect_encoding($content)` detects `Windows-1256` as `UTF-8` `mb_detect_encoding($content, "windows-1256")` gives an error `Illegal argument` ``` function is_utf8($string) { return preg_match('%^(?: [\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E] # ASCII | [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF] # non-overlong 2-byte | \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF] # excluding overlongs | [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # straight 3-byte | \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF] # excluding surrogates | \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # planes 1-3 | [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3} # planes 4-15 | \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2} # plane 16 )*$%xs', $string); } ``` This function returns "0" if not UTF-8 but when string is UTF-8 it returns "Page can not be found". I'm not sure why! My code is: ``` $html = file_get_html($…

Accepted Answer

Have you tried using

```
function is_utf8($string) {
  return (mb_detect_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', true) == 'UTF-8');
}
```

This works for me on the URLs you're specifying.

Also, I had the masrawy.com site CONSTANTLY fail to load (perhaps why you might be seeing "Page can not be found") while testing a few different options...

Oddly enough, trying to use the regex like you have caused PHP to completely commit suicide for my Windows install, taking Apache down with it.

Detect charset of string in PHP (UTF-8 or Windows-1256)

Solution

Problem