PHP Chinese Garbled Character Solution on Linux: Quick Troubleshooting and Fixes

gitbox 2025-07-27

How to Solve PHP Chinese Garbled Character Issues in Web Development

In web development, particularly when using PHP on Linux, developers often encounter Chinese garbled character problems. These issues are typically caused by encoding mismatches. This article will delve into common causes of Chinese garbled characters in PHP on Linux and how to effectively resolve them to ensure proper character handling and improve user experience.

Common Causes of Chinese Garbled Characters

The main cause of Chinese garbled characters is inconsistent character encoding. PHP uses UTF-8 encoding by default, but different encoding might be used in the database, file system, or during data transmission, causing mismatched encoding and displaying characters incorrectly.

Common Garbled Character Scenarios

When running PHP applications on Linux, you may encounter several scenarios that result in Chinese garbled characters, including:

Encoding mismatch when interacting with the MySQL database
Incorrect character encoding settings in the HTML page
PHP file itself is not saved in UTF-8 encoding

Solution 1: Set MySQL Database Encoding

The first step to prevent Chinese garbled characters is to ensure the MySQL database and tables are created using UTF-8 encoding. You can use the following SQL command to create the database:

<span class="fun">CREATE DATABASE your_database_name CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;</span>

Next, ensure the character set is set correctly when connecting to the database:

<span class="fun">mysqli_set_charset($connection, 'utf8mb4');</span>

Solution 2: Ensure PHP Files Are Saved in UTF-8 Encoding

Make sure that your PHP files are saved in UTF-8 encoding. In popular code editors like Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text, you can choose the UTF-8 encoding when saving the file.

Solution 3: Set HTTP Response Header

At the top of your PHP script, make sure to send the correct Content-Type response header to ensure the client properly interprets the page encoding:

<span class="fun">header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');</span>

Solution 4: Set HTML Page Charset

In the tag of your HTML page, make sure to declare the UTF-8 character set so that the page correctly displays Chinese characters:

<span class="fun"><meta charset="UTF-8"></span>

Conclusion

By following the solutions outlined above, you should be able to resolve PHP Chinese garbled character issues in the Linux environment. Ensure that UTF-8 encoding is consistently used in the database, PHP files, HTTP response headers, and HTML pages to effectively avoid garbled characters. If issues persist, carefully check the encoding settings at each step to locate and fix any mismatches.