PHP DOMDocument loadHTML not encoding UTF-8 correctly

character encodingPHPutf-8

I'm trying to parse some HTML using DOMDocument, but when I do, I suddenly lose my encoding (at least that is how it appears to me).

$profile = "<div><p>various japanese characters</p></div>";
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($profile); 

$divs = $dom->getElementsByTagName('div');

foreach ($divs as $div) {
    echo $dom->saveHTML($div);
}

The result of this code is that I get a bunch of characters that are not Japanese. However, if I do:

echo $profile;

it displays correctly. I've tried saveHTML and saveXML, and neither display correctly. I am using PHP 5.3.

What I see:

ã¤ãªãã¤å·ã·ã«ã´ã«ã¦ãã¢ã¤ã«ã©ã³ãç³»ã®å®¶åºã«ã9äººåå¼ã®5çªç®ã¨ãã¦çã¾ãããå½¼ãå«ãã¦4äººãä¿³åªã«ãªã£ããç¶è¦ªã¯æ¨æã®ã»ã¼ã«ã¹ãã³ã§ãæ¯è¦ªã¯éµä¾¿å±ã®å®¢å®¤ä¿ã ã£ããé«æ ¡æä»£ã¯ãã£ãã£ã®ã¢ã«ãã¤ãã«å¤ãã¿ãæè²è³éãåããªããã«ããªãã¯ç³»ã®é«æ ¡ã¸é²å¦ã

What should be shown:

イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9人兄弟の5番目として生まれる。彼を含めて4人が俳優になった。父親は木材のセールスマンで、母親は郵便局の客室係だった。高校時代はキャディのアルバイトに勤しみ、教育資金を受けながらカトリック系の高校へ進学

EDIT: I've simplified the code down to five lines so you can test it yourself.

$profile = "<div lang=ja><p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、</p></div>";
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($profile);
echo $dom->saveHTML();
echo $profile;

Here is the html that is returned:

<div lang="ja"><p>ã‚¤ãƒªãƒŽã‚¤å·žã‚·ã‚«ã‚´ã«ã¦ã€ã‚¢ã‚¤ãƒ«ãƒ©ãƒ³ãƒ‰ç³»ã®å®¶åºã«ã€</p></div>
<div lang="ja"><p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、</p></div>

Best Answer

DOMDocument::loadHTML will treat your string as being in ISO-8859-1 unless you tell it otherwise. This results in UTF-8 strings being interpreted incorrectly.

If your string doesn't contain an XML encoding declaration, you can prepend one to cause the string to be treated as UTF-8:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>' . $profile);
echo $dom->saveHTML();

If you cannot know if the string will contain such a declaration already, there's a workaround in SmartDOMDocument which should help you:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($profile, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));
echo $dom->saveHTML();

This is not a great workaround, but since not all characters can be represented in ISO-8859-1 (like these katana), it's the safest alternative.

Related Solutions

PHP “pretty print” HTML (not Tidy)

you're right, there seems to be no indentation for HTML (others are also confused). XML works, even with loaded code.

<?php
function tidyHTML($buffer) {
    // load our document into a DOM object
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    // we want nice output
    $dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
    $dom->loadHTML($buffer);
    $dom->formatOutput = true;
    return($dom->saveHTML());
}

// start output buffering, using our nice
// callback function to format the output.
ob_start("tidyHTML");

?>
<html>
    <head>
    <title>foo bar</title><meta name="bar" value="foo"><body><h1>bar foo</h1><p>It's like comparing apples to oranges.</p></body></html>
<?php
// this will be called implicitly, but we'll
// call it manually to illustrate the point.
ob_end_flush();
?>

result:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>foo bar</title>
<meta name="bar" value="foo">
</head>
<body>
<h1>bar foo</h1>
<p>It's like comparing apples to oranges.</p>
</body>
</html>

the same with saveXML() ...

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>foo bar</title>
    <meta name="bar" value="foo"/>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>bar foo</h1>
    <p>It's like comparing apples to oranges.</p>
  </body>
</html>

probably forgot to set preserveWhiteSpace=false before loadHTML?

disclaimer: i stole most of the demo code from tyson clugg/php manual comments. lazy me.

UPDATE: i now remember some years ago i tried the same thing and ran into the same problem. i fixed this by applying a dirty workaround (wasn't performance critical): i just somehow converted around between SimpleXML and DOM until the problem vanished. i suppose the conversion got rid of those nodes. maybe load with dom, import with simplexml_import_dom, then output the string, parse this with DOM again and then printed it pretty. as far as i remember this worked (but it was really slow).

Php – Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

If you apply utf8_encode() to an already UTF-8 string, it will return garbled UTF-8 output.

I made a function that addresses all this issues. It´s called Encoding::toUTF8().

You don't need to know what the encoding of your strings is. It can be Latin1 (ISO 8859-1), Windows-1252 or UTF-8, or the string can have a mix of them. Encoding::toUTF8() will convert everything to UTF-8.

I did it because a service was giving me a feed of data all messed up, mixing UTF-8 and Latin1 in the same string.

Usage:

require_once('Encoding.php');
use \ForceUTF8\Encoding;  // It's namespaced now.

$utf8_string = Encoding::toUTF8($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

$latin1_string = Encoding::toLatin1($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

Download:

https://github.com/neitanod/forceutf8

I've included another function, Encoding::fixUFT8(), which will fix every UTF-8 string that looks garbled.

Usage:

require_once('Encoding.php');
use \ForceUTF8\Encoding;  // It's namespaced now.

$utf8_string = Encoding::fixUTF8($garbled_utf8_string);

Examples:

echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃ©dÃ©ration Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃÂ©dÃÂ©ration Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃÂÃÂ©dÃÂÃÂ©ration Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃÂ©dération Camerounaise de Football");

will output:

Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football

I've transformed the function (forceUTF8) into a family of static functions on a class called Encoding. The new function is Encoding::toUTF8().

Best Answer

Related Solutions

PHP “pretty print” HTML (not Tidy)

Php – Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

Related Topic