How can I know if url-encoded string is UTF-8 or Latin-1 with PHP?

character-encoding, php, url-encoding

Solution

`mb_detect_encoding()` is normally useless with the default second parameter:

<?php

$x1 = 'Cl%C3%A9ment';
$x2 = 'Cl%E9ment';

$encoding_list = array('utf-8', 'iso-8859-1');

var_dump(
    mb_detect_encoding(urldecode($x1), $encoding_list),
    mb_detect_encoding(urldecode($x2), $encoding_list)
);

... prints:

string(5) "UTF-8"
string(10) "ISO-8859-1"

Problem

I am getting data from various site through url. Url parameters are url-encoded with the php `urlencode()` function, but character encoding can be still be UTF-8 or Latin-1. For example, the é character, when url-encoded from UTF-8 becomes %C3%A9 but when url-encoded from Latin-1, it becomes %E9. When I get data through url, I use `urldecode()` and then I need to know what is the character encoding so I eventually use `utf8_encode` before I insert them in a MySQL database. Strangely, the following code doesn't work : ``` $x1 = 'Cl%C3%A9ment'; $x2 = 'Cl%E9ment'; echo mb_detect_encoding(urldecode($x1)).' / '.mb_detect_encoding(urldecode($x2)); ``` It returns `UTF-8 / UTF-8` Why is that, what am I doing wrong and how can I know the character encoding of those string ? Thanks

Original source