Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : PHP gettext - issue w/ accent marks

[nkad]

I'm trying to translate a site to Spanish, but accent marks are not displaying correctly. For example,

echo _("Password"); should output the translation Contraseña, but instead it appears as Contrase~na.

I'm using poedit, with charset iso-8859-1. I tried setting it to UTF-8 but it didn't make a difference.

[nkad]

I just tested this with Python and it works fine. I'm using PHP 5.2.5.

[nkad]

I've spend countless hours wrestling with this problem before coming here and posting about it. Turns out I got it working after adding this PHP code:

bind_textdomain_codeset("messages", "ISO-8859-1");

[Saeven]

nkad,

UTF-8 can successfully display Spanish characters, however, if your characters are stored in a different encoding, then you'll get cross-encoding disparities (look like trash characters).

It's important to display characters in their original encodings, or otherwise convert the data to the target display encoding. mbstring has a conversion function that fixes these issues.

So consider:
poedit in utf-8, you must have the charset on the output set to utf-8.

Sticking to gettext, I think that without using bind_textdomain_codeset, PHP's behavior is to fallback on locale-data. This writ, I would strongly recommend sticking to locale and resource bundles instead of using gettext. PHP6 has a fantastic alternative that they've called 'i18n', http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/intro.i18n.php

Glad you solved your problem in one way or the other though