I have text that was converted between two encodings (non UTF-8) and then saved as UTF-8. How to restore the encoding using php?
Everything works fine if we just need to convert the text from any encoding to UTF-8:
$text = 'РєСѓСЂСЃ';
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "WINDOWS-1251", "UTF-8");
echo($text);
// OUTPUT: курс
// Works!
Things get more complicated if the text has been converted between two non UTF-8 encodings. For example from IBM866 to WINDOWS-1251.
Direct conversion does not work at all:
$text = '╬яЁхфхыхэшх л╚эЇюЁьрЎшюээюую яЁюфєъЄр╗';
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "IBM866", "WINDOWS-1251");
echo($text);
// OUTPUT: �??�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�? �?�??�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�? �?�?�?�?�?�?�?�?�??
// Does not work
Things got better when I added conversion from and to UTF-8:
$text = '╬яЁхфхыхэшх л╚эЇюЁьрЎшюээюую яЁюфєъЄр╗';
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "IBM866", "utf-8");
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "IBM866", "WINDOWS-1251");
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "utf-8", "IBM866");
echo($text);
// OUTPUT: Определение ?Информационного продукта?
// Almost works. Instead of "?" should be "«" and "»"
And in some combinations of encodings no option works. For example from ISO-8859-1 to IBM866:
$text = 'ਫ®¦¥¨¥ 4';
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "ISO-8859-1", "IBM866");
echo($text);
// OUTPUT: ???????????????????? 4
// Does not work
$text = 'ਫ®¦¥¨¥ 4';
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "ISO-8859-1", "utf-8");
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "ISO-8859-1", "IBM866");
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "utf-8", "ISO-8859-1");
echo($text);
// OUTPUT: ?????????? 4
// Does not work
To make sure the original lines are ok, I did the same transformations in Python:
text = '╬яЁхфхыхэшх л╚эЇюЁьрЎшюээюую яЁюфєъЄр╗'
text = text.encode('cp866').decode('windows-1251')
print(text)
// OUTPUT: Определение «Информационного продукта»
// Works
text = 'ਫ®¦¥¨¥ 4'
text = text.encode('ISO-8859-1').decode('cp866')
print(text)
// OUTPUT: Приложение 4
// Works
Is it possible to get the same result in PHP as in Python?
2
Answers
Thanks to JosefZ for the answer! I modified his answer to not use additional libraries:
Apply
UConverter::transcode
– Convert a string from one character encoding to another.The following script applies exactly the same encoding and decoding mechanism like Python code snippet
.encode('cp866').decode('cp1251')
.Output
.SO76752650.php
A more compact code snippet (the same result):