String Literal Travel Path

This section providing information on how string literals in PHP scripts travel through various applications from you as a publisher to a user as a viewer of a Web page.

In order to enter Chinese characters in PHP scripts and output them in Web pages correctly, you need to understand how a character string is being created in PHP, written into a Web page, and transferred through various applications to reach the viewer's screen. Here is a simplified diagram that shows the steps and applications used to create and deliver PHP strings to viewer's screen:

P1. Key Sequences from keyboard
      |
      |- Text editor
      v
P2. PHP Script
      |
      |- PHP-CGI
      v
P3. HTML Document
      |
      |- Web server
      v
P4. HTTP Response
      |
      |- Internet TCP/IP Connection
      v
P5. HTTP Response
      |
      |- Web browser
      v
P6. Visual characters on the screen

If you decided to use UTF-8 encoding to enter Chinese characters in your PHP scripts that generates HTML documents, you need to make sure that all applications mentioned in the above diagram are friendly to UTF-8 encoding. Otherwise, corrupted characters could be introduced during the transfer process and displayed on viewer's screen.

Fortunately, most editors, PHP CGI, Web servers, TCP/IP interfaces, and Web browsers do support UTF-8 nicely.

The PHP string literal travel path diagram can also help you to troubleshoot problem in displaying Chinese Web pages. The best strategy is to use diagnostic tool to capture the HTML document at different steps and review it to see if there are any damages.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 PHP Installation on Windows Systems

 Integrating PHP with Apache Web Server

 charset="*" - Encodings on Chinese Web Pages

Chinese Characters in PHP String Literals

 String Data Type, Literals and Functions

String Literal Travel Path

 Chinese Character String with UTF-8 Encoding

 Chinese Character String with GB18030 Encoding Error

 Chinese Character String with GB18030 Encoding

 Chinese Character String with Big5 Encoding

 UTF-8 Encoding Pages with Big5 Characters

 Multibyte String Functions in UTF-8 Encoding

 Input Text Data from Web Forms

 Input Chinese Text Data from Web Forms

 MySQL - Installation on Windows

 MySQL - Connecting PHP to Database

 MySQL - Character Set and Encoding

 MySQL - Sending Non-ASCII Text to MySQL

 Retrieving Chinese Text from Database to Web Pages

 Input Chinese Text Data to MySQL Database

 Chinese Text Encoding Conversion and Corruptions

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB