PHP declare encoding

declare, encoding, php, utf-8

Solution

PHP 5.6 comes with a new default charset directive set to `UTF-8`, in some case this may be a problem with pages served in metatag as latin1, you can override this directive by calling `ini_set('default_charset', 'iso-8859-1')` in your scripts.

For doing that put on each php file you want to be coded to latin1 this piece of code at the beginning of your scripts:

example: `index.php`

<?php
  $server_root = realpath($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]);
  $config_serv = "$server_root/php/config.php";
  include("$config_serv");
?>

Then create a folder "php" under your root website and put this piece of code into `config.php`:

example: `config.php`

<?php
  ##########################################################################
  # Server Directive - Override default_charset utf-8 to latin1 in php.ini #
  ##########################################################################
  @ini_set('default_charset', 'ISO-8859-1');
?>

If your php.ini is set to latin1 (`ISO-8859-1`) and you want serve a utf-8 (unicode) page you can force encoding using the same way but putting instead of iso-8859-1, utf-8. Look at that:

example: `config.php`

<?php
  ##########################################################################
  # Server Directive - Override default_charset latin1 to utf-8 in php.ini #
  ##########################################################################
  @ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
?>

I hope you find my answer useful, I solved my problem in this way!

Problem

On the `declare()` page of the PHP manual: Encoding A script's encoding can be specified per-script using the encoding directive. Example #3 Declaring an encoding for the script. ``` <?php declare(encoding='ISO-8859-1'); // code here ?> ``` What does this do exactly? How is the behaviour of the script affected by this directive? How does this differ from setting the directives `mbstring.internal_encoding` (before PHP 5.6) and `default_charset` (as of PHP 5.6) or using the `mb_internal_encoding()` function? (I use both PHP 5.3 and 5.5. Currently my files are saved in UTF-8 and I send the header `Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8` when serving HTML files.)

Original source