How to parse an ini-file containing special characters with "parse_ini_file"?

Question

I have a folder.ini containing:

[Labels]
; Ordnername
name=testverzeichnis
; Ordnerbeschreibung
description=verzeichnis zu testen von daten
[Contents]
[Publisher]
publisher=e-Solutions
copyright=André Reinhardt

and when I parse it with parse_ini_file() I got � instead of é. My Code:

$ini_array = parse_ini_file("sad - Kopie (6)/folder.ini", TRUE);
print_r($ini_array);

I tried to replace é with é but then my string is 0.

Addition: This code to view the content works with both, é and &eacute:

echo file_get_contents($directories[$i]."/folder.ini")

How can I avoid this?

Answer 1

The following is an assumption because your question does not document technically so far what the actual cause is.

However what can be said is that you have a character encoding related issue here.

Save your INI file with the UTF-8 encoding and this should work. I assume your PHP script outputs UTF-8 to the browser and the values in the INI file are not UTF-8 encoded. If you save the INI file with UTF-8 encoding, this should then work.

The key point here is not so much the "UTF-8" but that you save the INI file with the right character encoding that is expected from the application you use. For example if your application uses ISO-8859-1, then save the INI file with the ISO-8859-1 encoding.

Both - the INI file and the PHP script - need to speak the same "language".

You can add a "translator" that is able to help you bring two different "languages" together. Such a translator (or more correctly re-encoder) is iconv:

$ini_iso88591 = file_get_contents("sad - Kopie (6)/folder.ini");
$ini_utf8     = iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $ini_iso88591);
$ini_array    = parse_ini_string($ini_utf8, TRUE);