Detect Encoding Php < 2025 >

We’ve all been there. You import a CSV from a client, scrape a legacy website, or process an old text file, and suddenly your output looks like é instead of é . Garbage characters. Mojibake.

// Double-check UTF-8 validity if ($detected === 'UTF-8' && !mb_check_encoding($string, 'UTF-8')) return 'Windows-1252'; // common fallback detect encoding php

$string = "Café"; $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string); echo $encoding; // UTF-8 (usually) By default, it looks for . You can pass a custom list of encodings: We’ve all been there

The root cause?

function smartEncodingDetect(string $string, array $priorities = ['UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', 'Windows-1252']) foreach ($priorities as $encoding) // For UTF-8, validate it strictly if ($encoding === 'UTF-8' && mb_check_encoding($string, 'UTF-8')) return 'UTF-8'; // For others, attempt detection if (mb_detect_encoding($string, $encoding, true) === $encoding) return $encoding; return 'UTF-8'; // safe fallback Mojibake

There’s also a pure-PHP option: combined with mb_* functions gives you a U::toUtf8() method that attempts detection + conversion. What About Files? finfo vs mb_detect_encoding Don't confuse file encoding (how bytes are structured) with MIME content type .