How can I write a file in UTF-8 format?

Question

I have bunch of files that are not in UTF-8 encoding and I'm converting a site to UTF-8 encoding.

I'm using simple script for files that I want to save in UTF-8, but the files are saved in old encoding:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
$fpath = "folder";
$d = dir($fpath);
while (False !== ($a = $d->read()))
{
    if ($a != '.' and $a != '..')
    {
        $npath = $fpath . '/' . $a;

        $data = file_get_contents($npath);

        file_put_contents('tempfolder/' . $a, $data);
    }
}

How can I save files in UTF-8 encoding?

Answer 1

file_get_contents() and file_put_contents() will not magically convert encoding.

You have to convert the string explicitly; for example with iconv() or mb_convert_encoding().

Try this:

$data = file_get_contents($npath);
$data = mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', 'OLD-ENCODING');
file_put_contents('tempfolder/' . $a, $data);

Or alternatively, with PHP's stream filters:

$fd = fopen($file, 'r');
stream_filter_append($fd, 'convert.iconv.UTF-8/OLD-ENCODING');
stream_copy_to_stream($fd, fopen($output, 'w'));