Posts

Stefan Helander

phplist problem with local UTF-8-characters in subject line

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phplist is a popular software for sending newsletter to large lists of recievers. It has a large number of features which I will not go into depth here. For more information about what phplist can do –  visit the phplist homepage.

If you are experiencing problems when you are sending a newsletter containing local characters, like the Swedish Å, Ä and Ö in the subject line, the most probable reason is that administration web pages are rendered in a character set different from the one used in the newsletter.

The following solution is assuming that you are running phplist on a Linux host.

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Stefan Helander

PHP htmlspecialchars_decode doesn’t handle nordic/german characters like å, ä and ö

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The PHP functions htmlspecialchars and it’s reverse htmlspecialchars_decode only handles the following characters:

  • ‘&’ (ampersand) becomes ‘&’
  • ‘”‘ (double quote) becomes ‘"’ when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.
  • ”’ (single quote) becomes ‘'’ only when ENT_QUOTES is set.
  • ‘<‘ (less than) becomes ‘&lt;’
  • ‘>’ (greater than) becomes ‘&gt;’

If you want to output html text containing nordic/german characters like Å, Ä, Ö and Ü in dialog boxes (popups) these characters also needs to be converted. The following PHP function does this for you:

function unhtml( $string ) {
$string = str_replace ( '&amp;', '&', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&#039;', '\'', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&quot;', '"', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&lt;', '<', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&gt;', '>', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&uuml;', 'ü', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&Uuml;', 'Ü', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&auml;', 'ä', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&Auml;', 'Ä', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&ouml;', 'ö', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&Ouml;', 'Ö', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&aring;', 'å', $string );
$string = str_replace ( '&Aring;', 'Å', $string );
return $string;
}

It is important that the code is saved in UTF-8 encoding (or the format your web page is using). Edit the code in for example Windows notedpad and use Save as. Now you can select UTF-8 encoding when saving the file.

Or if you are using UNIX / Linux you can use iconv to convert the file if it is not already in the correct format. First, to find out the current encoding for your file, use the file command:

$ file --mime-encoding unhtml.php
unhtml.php: iso-8859-1

Now, to convert it to UTF-8 using the iconv command:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 unhtml.php > unhtml-utf-8.php

The reverse of unhtml is of course the html function:

/* Encodes specific characters for display as html */
function html($string) {
  $string = str_replace ( '&', '&amp;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( '\'', '&#039;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( '"', '&quot;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( '<', '&lt;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( '>', '&gt;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'ü', '&uuml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'Ü', '&Uuml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'ä', '&auml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'Ä', '&Auml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'ö', '&ouml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'Ö', '&Ouml;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'å', '&aring;', $string );
  $string = str_replace ( 'Å', '&Aring;', $string );
  return $string;
}
?>