Issue with Special Characters (ñ) in DBF File Generated by PHP

Question

Description:

I am encountering difficulties when generating a DBF file using PHP's dbase extension. The problem arises when including special characters like "ñ" in the data.

Problem:

The generated DBF file contains ASCII values for special characters instead of the actual characters. Example: "Jane ñ Doe" becomes "Jane ├▒ Doe" in the DBF file.

I have tried setting the character encoding in PHP using header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');, but the issue persists. I have attempted to convert special characters to other encodings, but the results are not as expected.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Set the DBF file path
$dbfFilePath = 'D:\INCOME\new.dbf';

// Create a DBF file
$dbf = dbase_create($dbfFilePath, [
    ['ID', 'N', 5, 0],
    ['Name', 'C', 50],
]);

// Add sample data with special characters
foreach ([[1, 'John Doe'], [2, 'Jane ñ Doe'], [3, 'Alice']] as $row) {
    dbase_add_record($dbf, $row);
}

// Close the DBF file
dbase_close($dbf);

Answer 1

I think you should use iconv() or mb_convert_encoding() in PHP to convert your string encoding from UTF-8 to the required one. For example, if you find that Windows-1252 works, you can use something like the following -->

$encodedName = iconv('UTF-8', 'Windows-1252', 'Jane ñ Doe');

OR mb_convert_encoding

$encodedName = mb_convert_encoding('Jane ñ Doe', 'Windows-1252', 'UTF-8');

so in the aboce example 'Jane ñ Doe' (which is in UTF-8) is converted to Windows-1252 encoding. Then use $encodedName in your dbase record creation

dbase_add_record($dbf, [2, $encodedName]);