French accents, php, email and web development

(Geek alert). I have been working a lot on a website funded by CIDA, which has to be bi-lingual, French and English. The pages use PHP, and I ran into a lot of problems trying to reconcile French letters and PHP. I googled around, thinking that surely these problems would be well documented, but I didn’t find a very good comprehensive resource – maybe because it’s only available in French. However, I thought I’d gather some of my experiences here, to save other folks time.

First, just getting the French onto the website; if you cut and paste French accented letters, they’ll look horrible. If you save the file as unicode, they will look fine, BUT: PHP will crash! PHP is apparently incredibly backwards when it comes to unicode (come on guys, it’s 2006! 26 letters is not enough anymore, and hasn’t been for like 20 years…) The solution is to turn the page into so-called html-entities, for example to get Å’, you need to write Œ. Of course, changing this manually is a real pain, especially if you like editing your pages in a text-editor for maximum control. I wrote a little sed-script that does this automatically, download it here.

The way to use it is to finish editing your file, say french.php, and run
sed -f french.sed french.php > out
and then
cp out french.php

This assumes that you are running a UNIX-based system (including Mac OSX). If not, you can upload french.sed to your server, and run it there (if you have shell access). Sed is just a simple program that is included in most UNIX distributions, and french.sed is a simple file containing which search-and-replace operations to be conducted. Just a few lines, but I’ve used it a lot, and is highly useful.

For sending emails in French from a php-script, you need another method; quoted-printable. This looks like this: =F4, and you can use to transform any text to quoted printable. If you have a lot of text, you can of course construct a similar sed script, or I even think php has a built-in function. Either way, it did the job for me. In addition, you need to add a few e-mail headers. I figured this out simply by typing in letters with French accents in Gmail, mailing it to myself, and then using Show original (very useful!). Here is an example of a code piece that sends a French e-mail from php:

Finally, as a bonus: Here is a tiny script that extracts records from a MySql database according to a certain criteria, and sends all the people a personalized email. Very simple, but it works. And please don’t use this to spam anyone!

Stian

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.