PHPMailer Content-Transfer-Encoding

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("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃÂédÃÂération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération 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().

If you are 100% sure $message contain ISO-8859-1 you can use utf8_encode as David says. Otherwise use mb_detect_encoding and mb_convert_encoding on $message.

Also take note that

$mail -> charSet = "UTF-8"; 

Should be replaced by:

$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';

And placed after the instantiation of the class (after the new). The properties are case sensitive! See the PHPMailer doc fot the list & exact spelling.

Also the default encoding of PHPMailer is 8bit which can be problematic with UTF-8 data. To fix this you can do:

$mail->Encoding = 'base64';

Take note that 'quoted-printable' would probably work too in these cases (and maybe even 'binary'). For more details you can read RFC1341 - Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field.