iconv

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.5, PHP 5, PHP 7)

iconv — Convert string to requested character encoding

Description

iconv ( string $in_charset , string $out_charset , string $str ) : string

Performs a character set conversion on the string str from in_charset to out_charset.

Parameters

in_charset

The input charset.

out_charset

The output charset.

If you append the string //TRANSLIT to out_charset transliteration is activated. This means that when a character can't be represented in the target charset, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. If you append the string //IGNORE, characters that cannot be represented in the target charset are silently discarded. Otherwise, E_NOTICE is generated and the function will return FALSE.

Caution

If and how //TRANSLIT works exactly depends on the system's iconv() implementation (cf. ICONV_IMPL). Some implementations are known to ignore //TRANSLIT, so the conversion is likely to fail for characters which are illegal for the out_charset.

str

The string to be converted.

Return Values

Returns the converted string or FALSE on failure.

Changelog

Version Description
5.4.0 Since this version, the function returns FALSE on illegal characters, unless //IGNORE is specified in output charset. Before, it returned partial output string.

Examples

Example #1 iconv() example

<?php
$text = "This is the Euro symbol '€'.";

echo 'Original : ', $text, PHP_EOL;
echo 'TRANSLIT : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'IGNORE   : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'Plain    : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $text), PHP_EOL;

?>

The above example will output something similar to:

Original : This is the Euro symbol '€'.
TRANSLIT : This is the Euro symbol 'EUR'.
IGNORE   : This is the Euro symbol ''.
Plain    :
Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in .\iconv-example.php on line 7