PHP DOMDocument loadHTML not encoding UTF-8 correctly

DOMDocument::loadHTML will treat your string as being in ISO-8859-1 unless you tell it otherwise. This results in UTF-8 strings being interpreted incorrectly.

If your string doesn't contain an XML encoding declaration, you can prepend one to cause the string to be treated as UTF-8:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';$dom = new DOMDocument();$dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>' . $profile);echo $dom->saveHTML();

If you cannot know if the string will contain such a declaration already, there's a workaround in SmartDOMDocument which should help you:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';$dom = new DOMDocument();$dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($profile, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));echo $dom->saveHTML();

This is not a great workaround, but since not all characters can be represented in ISO-8859-1 (like these katana), it's the safest alternative.

The problem is with saveHTML() and saveXML(), both of them do not work correctly in Unix. They do not save UTF-8 characters correctly when used in Unix, but they work in Windows.

The workaround is very simple:

If you try the default, you will get the error you described

$str = $dom->saveHTML(); // saves incorrectly

All you have to do is save as follows:

$str = $dom->saveHTML($dom->documentElement); // saves correctly

This line of code will get your UTF-8 characters to be saved correctly. Use the same workaround if you are using saveXML().

Update

As suggested by "Jack M" in the comments section below, and verified by "Pamela" and "Marco Aurélio Deleu", the following variation might work in your case:

$str = utf8_decode($dom->saveHTML($dom->documentElement));

Note

1. English characters do not cause any problem when you use saveHTML() without parameters (because English characters are saved as single byte characters in UTF-8)

2. The problem happens when you have multi-byte characters (such as Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, ...etc.)

I recommend reading this article: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/06/all-about-unicode-utf8-character-sets/. You will understand how UTF-8 works and why you have this problem. It will take you about 30 minutes, but it is time well spent.

Make sure the real source file is saved as UTF-8 (You may even want to try the non-recommended BOM Chars with UTF-8 to make sure).

Also in case of HTML, make sure you have declared the correct encoding using meta tags:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

If it's a CMS (as you've tagged your question with Joomla) you may need to configure appropriate settings for the encoding.