Apple Push Notifications With Foreign Accent Characters Not Receiving

Question

I'm sending push notifications and when the message contains foreign characters (Turkish in my case) like İ, ş, ç, ğ... The message does not arrive to devices.

Here's my code:

$message = 'THİS is push';
$passphrase = 'mypass';
$ctx = stream_context_create();
stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'local_cert', 'MyPemFile.pem');
stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'passphrase', $passphrase);

// Open a connection to the APNS server
$fp = stream_socket_client(
    'ssl://gateway.push.apple.com:2195', $err,
    $errstr, 60, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT|STREAM_CLIENT_PERSISTENT, $ctx);
if (!$fp)
    exit("Failed to connect: $err $errstr" . PHP_EOL);
echo 'Connected to Apple service. ' . PHP_EOL;

// Encode the payload as JSON
$body['aps'] = array(
    'alert' => $message,
    'sound' => 'default'
    );
$payload = json_encode($body);

$result = 'Start'.PHP_EOL;
$tokenArray = array('mytoken');
foreach ($tokenArray as $item)
{
// Build the binary notification
$msg = chr(0) . pack('n', 32) . pack('H*', $item) . pack('n', strlen($payload)) . $payload;
// Send it to the server
$result = fwrite($fp, $msg, strlen($msg));
if (!$result)
    echo 'Failed message'.PHP_EOL;
else
    echo 'Successful message'.PHP_EOL;
}

// Close the connection to the server
fclose($fp);

I have tried encoding $message variable with utf8_encode() but the message received as "THÝS is push". And other ways like iconv() didn't work for me, some of them cropped Turkish characters, some didn't receive at all.

I also have

header('content-type: text/html; charset: utf-8');

and

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

in my page. I don't think the problem appears while I set the value but maybe with pack() function.

Any ideas to solve this without replacing characters with English?

Answer 1

All I had to do was replacing the Turkish characters with following script:

function tr_to_utf($text) {   
    $text = trim($text);    
    $search = array('Ü','Ş','Ğ','Ç','İ','Ö','ü','ş','ğ','ç','ı','ö');  
    $replace = array('Ãœ','Å','Ğ','Ç','Ä°','Ö','ü','ÅŸ','ÄŸ','ç','ı','ö');
    $new_text = str_replace($search,$replace,$text);    
    return $new_text;  
}

Now it is working with no problems.

This is the source.