apache - PHP 5.4 throw exception - Can't see message with ISO-8859-1 encoded string message

Question

I recently installed PHP 5.4 on my Ubuntu 12.10 from apt-get.

PHP Info shows: PHP Version 5.4.6-1ubuntu1

I just installed all common packages, like mysql, pgsql, curl, etc, didn't make any other changes but I have a problem.

I like using the ISO-8859-1/latin1 encoding in my files and databases, because it was where I got the best workflow. Now I have a problem with this because PHP does not seem to get along with exceptions whose messages encoded that way.

Well, just for clarify it better, I created a test file like this:

ini_set('display_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

throw new Exception('é');

If the code above is in a utf-8 file, it's all ok, with Xdegub enabled I get:

( ! ) Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'é' in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5
( ! ) Exception: é in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5
Call Stack
#   Time    Memory  Function    Location
1   0.0002  124212  {main}( )   ../teste.php:0

If the file is in ISO-8859-1, if Xdebug is enabled, the problem is just the message not being displayed:

( ! ) Fatal error: in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5
( ! ) Exception: in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5
Call Stack
#   Time    Memory  Function    Location
1   0.0002  124436  {main}( )   ../teste.php:0

However, without Xdebug, all I get is this "very clarifying" message:

Fatal error: in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5

Maybe it's a problem within Apache, because when I try the same using the command line, I get:

Stack trace:
#0 {main}
  thrown in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message '?' in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5

Exception: ? in /home/henrique/public/teste.php on line 5

Call Stack:
    0.0002     121256   1. {main}() /home/henrique/public/teste.php:0

The message is still there, however, it's illegible, but is there...

Edit

I also tried with Lighttpd 1.4.28 and the results were the same.

Edit 2:

Tried with PHP 5.4 built-in server and got this on my terminal:

[Wed Jun  5 21:32:08 2013] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message '?' in /var/www/test2.php:9
Stack trace:
#0 {main}
  thrown in /var/www/test2.php on line 9
[Wed Jun  5 21:32:08 2013] 127.0.0.1:55116 [200]: /test2.php - Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message '?' in /var/www/test2.php:9
Stack trace:
#0 {main}
  thrown in /var/www/test2.php on line 9

But in the browser, still the same problem.

Answer 1

The exception message in PHP is a string, like no news to you.

Strings in PHP are binary. This effectively means that PHP does not care at all about the encoding therein, strings in PHP just preserve any encoding that can be expressed with binary data in octets (that is that 8 bits form a single byte which then is one character in a PHP string if you use substring access like $string[10] to access the 11th character).

As all those things ensure that however you write the message, however it will be passed into the output.

So the only difference is how you display the output. Let's say you've got the Latin-1 encoding in that exception message string and you output it via your apache server and then you view it in your browser and your browser (we don't care about the reason so far) displays it as UTF-8 you will see that question-mark-diagmond/crystal: ?.

Same applies to the terminal if the terminal displays it as UTF-8.

Or if you save the output into a file and then you open that file in your editor as being UTF-8 encoded.

So how to fix that? For your browser, please look into the documentation of your browser how you can tell your browser in which encoding the website you're currently looking at should be displayed. Every browser I know of has some kind of menu where you can specify it. The charset you use is commmon, so even older browsers have that.

Same applies to the terminal. You can set the locale of the shell as well as the encoding for the terminal. Consult the documentation of the shell you're using.

For the textfile, I bet you now already know how to deal with it: Checkout which options your editor provide.

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A final note of caution: If you want to properly analyze what your server returns to a request containing the exception message output, you need to use the developer tools of your browser to make the server's response headers visible. You will likely see a change to your previous configuration that is (in error) saying that the content is UTF-8 encoded while the encoding is latin-1. Fix that error if you don't want to change the encoding in the browser manually. To do that, consult the PHP documentation and the documentation of your webserver.