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telegramurlencodearabic

Why is urlencode not working when posting message in Arabic via Telegram bot?

$message is retrieved from mysql db

The db tables have utf8_general_ci as character encoding

The following is executed with each connection:

mysqli_query($this->link,"set character set utf-8");

The php file is encoded utf-8

$message=urlencode($message);

When the following command is used:

echo $response = file_get_contents
("https://api.telegram.org/botxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/sendMessage?chat_id=-100xxxxxxx&disable_web_page_preview=TRUE&parse_mode=markdown&text=". $message);
}

If retrieved $message is stored in English: it works

If $message is stored in Arabic: it doesn't work

If $message is entered in Arabic in the file itself (not retrieved from db): it works

What is wrong? I would appreciate your help!

Solution

  • you need to config your MySQL DB character-set manually using phpMyadmin set it to "utf8" or programmatically when opening your connection try this code:

    $dbcon = mysqli_connect("host","user","pass","db"); 
    mysqli_query($dbcon, "set character_set_server='utf8'");        
    mysqli_query($dbcon, "set names 'utf8'");

    you may need to check the messages in the DB tables and may need to re-enter your msgs to the DB again if it's misformatted because of the wrong char-set.