Converting Legacy Applications To UTF-8

What are all the angles to be considered when you decide to standardise your text to UTF-8

1. CHARACTER FLAWS CHANGING A LEGACY APPLICATION TO UTF-8 June 4th 2015
2. • Legacy Applications are a mish-mash of encodings • Ever dealt with Irish names? • French / German / Eastern European? • What about a €uro Symbol? THE PROBLEM
3. Standardise your character encoding THE SOLUTION Simple - Right?
4. <?php 
 header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') ; 
 ?> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> HEADERS All Done… 
 …Just Like Austria in 1982 - Pack up and go home
5. Set Character Encodings Everywhere CHARACTER IN ≠ CHARACTER OUT Front End Pages ✔ Database ✔ Tables ✔ Columns ✔ Forms ✔ Server(s) ✔
6. DATABASE SET NAMES utf8 ; Connections Need to be UTF-8 Aware
7. DATABASE ALTER DATABASE database_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci Create a UTF-8 Database
8. DATABASE Change Existing Tables to UTF-8 ALTER TABLE table_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET 
 utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci ;
9. DATABASE ALTER TABLE table_name CHANGE title title VARCHAR( 128 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci ; Columns Need to be UTF-8
10. FORMS <form action=“post.php" method="post" 
 enctype="multipart/form-data"
 accept-charset="UTF-8"
 > POST only UTF-8 data
11. PHP INI default_charset = "utf-8"
12. PHP TEXT CONVERSION <?php utf8_encode ( $string) ; PHP Functions Only Encodes ISO-8859-1 Strings
13. PHP TEXT CONVERSION <?php iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $string); 
 // Translit = find a similar char e.. ä => a mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', ‘ISO-8859-1')
 // requires php-mbstring extension for multi-bytue support PHP Functions
14. PHP TEXT CONVERSION <?php htmlentities ( $string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') ; PHP Functions Specify encoding when escaping output
15. PHP TEXT CONVERSION <?php new UConverter([ string $destination_encoding [, string $source_encoding ]] ) $unconvertor->convert( $string ) ; Since PHP 5.5 - UConvertor
16. PHP SOURCE FILES - YOUR IDE All Team members should have same settings