John Davidson

Message:

The question is how does php handle different character encodings for character comparisons? I was told 2 things:

You can set the character encoding for php in some .ini file, and
php reads all characters as ascii (another stackoverflow post)

So which is it?

The question stems from the idea of if I have a svg font file and wanted to parse it to do character comparisons from the font with some input (a text file), do I need to be concerned about character encodings or can I do direct character comparisons?

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My Answer:
In PHP, character encoding can affect how character comparisons are handled. By default, PHP uses the ASCII character set for comparisons. However, you can set the character encoding for PHP in the php.ini file using the `default_charset` directive. This allows PHP to handle different character encodings, such as UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.

If you are working with a SVG font file and want to parse it for character comparisons with input from a text file, it is important to consider the character encoding of both the font file and the text file. If the files are in different character encodings, you may need to convert them to a common encoding before comparing characters. This can be done using PHP functions such as `mb_convert_encoding()` or `iconv()`.

In conclusion, while PHP does read characters as ASCII by default, you can set the character encoding to handle different encodings. When working with files in different character encodings, it is important to be aware of and manage the encoding to ensure accurate character comparisons.