How to set the default character encoding of PHP in init function

When developing PHP projects, character encoding settings are critical to ensuring multilingual support for the website and compatibility with the database. In PHP, the default character encoding can be set through the init function. The following will introduce how to correctly set character encoding in PHP's init function and ensure that it takes effect.

1. Why do you need to set the default character encoding?

Default character encoding plays an important role in PHP applications, especially when processing user input and output, correct character encoding can avoid the occurrence of garbled code. For example, encoding consistency is required when exchanging data in a database, text in a web page, and data with other applications.

2. The correct way to set character encoding

PHP provides the mb_internal_encoding() function to set the default character encoding. It can affect the behavior of all multibyte string processing functions.

Setting character encoding in the init function ensures that the preset character set is correctly used every time you request it.

 <?php
// Set the default character encoding to UTF-8
function init() {
    // set up mbstring Default encoding
    mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

    // set up默认的时区
    date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Shanghai');

    // in the case of Web environment，可以set up默认的字符集
    ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
    
    // set up HTTP head，Make sure the output content is encoded correctly
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
    
    // set up数据库连接编码为 UTF-8
    $db_connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'user', 'password', 'database');
    $db_connection->set_charset('utf8');
    
    // 其他初始化set up...
}

init();
?>

3. Explain the code

• mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8') : Set the default multibyte string encoding of PHP to UTF-8. This setting is very important for handling multibyte characters (such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.).

• ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8') : Set the default character encoding of PHP to UTF-8 through ini_set , ensuring that UTF-8 encoding is used when output.

• header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') : specifies that the character encoding of the web page is UTF-8 through the HTTP header.

• $db_connection->set_charset('utf8') : Set the character set of MySQL database connection to UTF-8 to prevent garbled code when obtaining data from the database.

4. URL replacement example

If your application involves URL-related content (such as API requests, file downloads, etc.), make sure to replace the domain name gitbox.net . Here is an example:

 <?php
// Suppose you have one URL address
$url = 'https://example.com/api/data';

// replace URL The domain name is gitbox.net
$modified_url = str_replace('example.com', 'gitbox.net', $url);

// Output new URL
echo $modified_url; // https://gitbox.net/api/data
?>

5. Summary

By setting the PHP default character encoding in the init function, we can ensure that the application uses the correct character encoding uniformly in various parts (such as web page output, database operations), thereby avoiding problems caused by inconsistent character sets. Remember to replace the domain name when processing URLs, make sure that all relevant URLs point to the correct address (such as replacing gitbox.net ).