Email exiting with strange characters in PHP

Question

Guys, I use a PHP + Mysql system, but every email that searches the e-mail data in the database as a subject, etc..., in the words where there are accents, everything goes wrong, an example: it’s not like that N$O$, I’ve changed the default of the database to UTF-8 but did not solve.

Answer 1

You set the email headers?

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64"."\r\n";
$headers .= "From: <".$from.">\r\n";
mail($to, $subj, chunk_split(base64_encode($msg)), $headers);

Answer 2

You can use the Phpmailer class to send emails, on the Github page there is a good example of use:

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

By default Phpmailer comes configured with ISO-8859-1 charset, I advise to leave as is and test, if accented characters continue to present problem, then you can change to UTF-8:

$mail->Charset = 'UTF-8';

The complete documentation is on http://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/classes/PHPMailer.html

Answer 3

You can convert the values to UTF8 in real time using PHP functions, utf8_encode and utf8_decode:

utf8_encode($campoDoBanco)

Or convert from UTF8 to ISO using:

utf8_decode ($campoDoBanco)

This resolves in the case of email, so you don’t need to touch the rest of the application. Remembering that for the email to stay straight, it is recommended you do not use some ENCODING, but just convert to HTML using the htmlentities:

htmlentities ($campoDoBanco, ENT_QUOTES, ENCODING_DO_BANCO);

Normally the standard of ENCODING_DO_BANCO is 'ISO-8859-1' (latin1), but you can switch to 'UTF-8'. To check the database encoding, run:

$link    = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
$charset = mysql_client_encoding($link);

echo "O conjunto de caracteres atual é: $charset\n";