php - Convert foreign characters with accents

Question

I'm trying to compare some text to the text in a database. In the database any text with an accent is encoded like in HTML (i.e. é) when I compare the database text to my string it doesn't match because my string just shows é. When I use the PHP function htmlentities to encode the string first the é turns into ?? weird? Using htmlspecialchars doesn't encode the é at all.

How would you suggest I compare é to é as well as all the other accented characters?

Answer 1

You need to send in the correct charset to htmlentities. It looks like you're using UTF-8, but the default is ISO-8859-1. Change it like this:

$encoded = htmlentities($text, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

Another solution is to convert the text to ISO-8859-1 before encoding, but that may destroy information (ISO-8859-1 does not contain nearly as many characters as UTF-8). If you want to try that instead, do like this:

$encoded = htmlentities(utf8_decode($text));