Charset Encoding {#charset}

Charset Encoding {#charset.encoding}

There are a variety of encodings for textual data, ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) and UTF-8 being the most popular. Unless you change Smarty::$_CHARSET, Smarty recognizes UTF-8 as the internal charset if Multibyte String is available, ISO-8859-1 if not.

> Note > > ISO-8859-1 has been PHP\'s default internal charset since the > beginning. Unicode has been evolving since 1991. Since then it has > become the one charset to conquer them all, as it is capable of > encoding most of the known characters even across different character > systems (latin, cyrillic, japanese, ...). UTF-8 is unicode\'s most > used encoding, as it allows referencing the thousands of character > with the smallest size overhead possible. > > Since unicode and UTF-8 are very wide spread nowadays, their use is > strongly encouraged.

> Note > > Smarty\'s internals and core plugins are truly UTF-8 compatible since > Smarty 3.1. To achieve unicode compatibility, the Multibyte > String PECL is required. Unless your PHP > environment offers this package, Smarty will not be able to offer > full-scale UTF-8 compatibility.

// use japanese character encoding
if (function_exists('mb_internal_charset')) {
  mb_internal_charset('EUC-JP');
}

require_once 'libs/Smarty.class.php';
Smarty::$_CHARSET = 'EUC-JP';
$smarty = new Smarty();