↑↑This is viewed in Chrome with Big5 encoding. The top is before conversion, and the bottom is after conversion.
Yesterday, while playing with the Google Weather API, I found that it has a parameter for setting your language. If you don’t set it, the API returns English in UTF-8 encoding. But if you set zh-TW, it returns Chinese, encoded in Big5. So when using this API, I had to re-encode its return value to UTF-8 before I could use it. After all, there aren’t many Big5 websites left, so yesterday I went looking for the mb_convert_encoding function to do the encoding conversion for me~
If you’re in a similar situation, where an API returns a string in an encoding you don’t want, then you’ll need the mb_convert_encoding function to convert it. mb_convert_encoding is actually quite useful. It converts the encoding of a given string, and it’s not limited to utf8->big5 or the reverse. It can even convert GBK and many other national encodings. However, before using it, you must make sure that mbstring is enabled in your PHP.
↑↑Windows users can check C:Windowsphp.ini to see whether php_mbstring.dll is installed properly.
mb_convert_encoding Syntax
mb_convert_encoding(string to convert, target encoding, original encoding)File download: Box.net ｜ 4Shared ｜ Xun6
Ex.
Convert a UTF-8 string to Big5:
$str='測試';
echo $str; //Still UTF-8 at this point
$str=mb_convert_encoding($str,'big5','utf8');
echo $str; //Now it's BIG-5