John Davidson

Message:

My PHP app processes incoming emails. The processing code usually works fine, but the app crashed recently with the below exception:

Unexpected encoding - UTF-8 or ASCII was expected (View: /home/customer/www/gonativeguide.com/gng2-core/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Mail/resources/views/html/panel.blade.php) {"exception":"[object] (Facade\\Ignition\\Exceptions\\ViewException(code: 0): Unexpected encoding - UTF-8 or ASCII was expected (View: /home/customer/www/gonativeguide.com/gng2-core/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Mail/resources/views/html/panel.blade.php) at /home/customer/www/gonativeguide.com/gng2-core/vendor/league/commonmark/src/Input/MarkdownInput.php:30)

It seems that there was an incoming email whose text was not properly decoded and this made the app crash later on.

I realized that the email had a Windows-1252 encoding:

Content-Type: text/html; charset="Windows-1252"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The email decoding code looks currently like this:

// DECODE DATA

        $data = ($partno)?

            imap_fetchbody($mbox,$mid,$partno):  // multipart

            imap_body($mbox,$mid);  // simple

        // Any part may be encoded, even plain text messages, so check everything.

        if ($p->encoding==4)

            $data = quoted_printable_decode($data);

        elseif ($p->encoding==3)

            $data = base64_decode($data);

I checked this page to understand what I need to change to decode emails with Windows-1252, but it not clear to me which value corresponds to Windows-1252 and how to decode and convert the data to UTF-8. I would highly appreciate any hints, preferably with suggested code on this.

Thanks,
W.

---

My Answer:
To decode and convert Windows-1252 charset emails in PHP using the imap extension, you can use the `imap_qprint` function to decode the email body and convert it to UTF-8. Here's an example code snippet that demonstrates how to do this:

php
// Connect to the IMAP server and select the mailbox
$mailbox = '{imap.example.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX';
$username = 'your_username';
$password = 'your_password';
$inbox = imap_open($mailbox, $username, $password);

// Fetch the email headers and body
$email_number = 1; // Change this to the desired email number
$email_headers = imap_headerinfo($inbox, $email_number);
$email_body = imap_body($inbox, $email_number);

// Decode the email body from Windows-1252 to UTF-8
$decoded_body = imap_qprint($email_body);

// Output the decoded email body
echo $decoded_body;

// Close the IMAP connection
imap_close($inbox);


In this code snippet, we first connect to the IMAP server and select the INBOX mailbox. We then fetch the email headers and body of the specified email number. Next, we use the `imap_qprint` function to decode the email body from Windows-1252 charset to UTF-8. Finally, we output the decoded email body and close the IMAP connection.

You can integrate this code snippet into your PHP app to handle Windows-1252 charset emails and prevent the unexpected encoding exception.