php sets web page display characters

PHP is a server-side scripting language that is widely used to create dynamic websites and web applications. In web development, setting the display characters of web pages is very important. If the character set is incorrectly set, the web page may have garbled characters, affecting user experience and interaction.

This article will introduce how to set the web page display character set in PHP, and provide common character set choices and suggestions.

1. What is a character set

A character set is a mapping relationship between a set of characters and numbers. It defines the binary encoding sequence corresponding to each character. Commonly used character sets include ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, etc.

ASCII code is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It contains 94 characters including the basic Latin alphabet (26 English letters), numbers, punctuation marks and control characters. ASCII code occupies one byte (8-bit binary number) of storage space.

Unicode is an international standard character set used to represent various language characters and symbols. The Unicode character set contains thousands of characters, including Latin letters, Chinese characters, Japanese kana, Greek letters, etc. Each character is represented by two to four bytes.

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding character set that can represent any Unicode character and is suitable for Internet transmission, storage, and display. UTF-8 encoding uses a length of 1 to 4 bytes to represent different Unicode characters, of which ASCII characters only need to be represented by one byte. UTF-8 encoding supports various language characters and symbols and has good compatibility and scalability.

2. PHP sets the web page character set

In PHP, you can use the header() function to set the web page character set. The example is as follows:

//Set the encoding to UTF- 8
header('Content-Type:text/html;charset=UTF-8');

//Set the encoding to GBK
header('Content-Type:text/html;charset =GBK');

The above code will set the Content-Type in the HTTP response header to text/html, and specify the character set to UTF-8 or GBK.

In addition, you can also use meta tags to set the character set in HTML documents. The example is as follows:

<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My Website</title>

<!-- 页面内容 -->

The above code will be in HTML Set the character set in the head tag of the document to UTF-8.

Normally, it is recommended to use the UTF-8 character set, because UTF-8 supports multiple languages ​​​​and symbols, and has the advantages of Internet standardization and compatibility.

3. Common character set selections and suggestions

In addition to UTF-8, there are other character sets to choose from. When selecting a character set, you need to consider the following factors:

1. Application scenarios: Different application scenarios have different requirements for character sets. For example, Chinese websites may need to use GBK or GB2312 character sets; English websites can use ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 character sets.
2. Compatibility: Different platforms and browsers have different levels of support for character sets. To ensure compatibility, choose a character set with broad support.
3. Website performance: Different character sets have different encoding lengths and characteristics, which have an impact on website performance. In general, using shorter encoding lengths and commonly used character sets can improve website performance.

The following are common character set choices and suggestions:

1. UTF-8: suitable for multi-language websites, international websites and Internet applications, with good compatibility and scalability.
2. GBK/GB2312: Applicable to Chinese websites, Windows platforms and some mobile browsers.
3. ISO-8859-1: Applicable to English websites and some European language websites.
4. Big5: Applicable to Taiwanese websites and some Chinese websites.

To sum up, setting the web page character set is an essential part of web development. Choosing a character set suitable for your website can effectively avoid garbled characters and improve user access experience and website performance.

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