mbstring settings for English/Japanese Environment

[clai83]

(A)

I am making a web application that needs to work in both an English/Japanese environment. This web application is intended to manage a company website (news releases, add new companies), and also contains an admin section available to administrators only. During my coding process I did not realize the existence of the mbstring functions since I am still fairly new to PHP. I am attempting to change the mbstring settings in the php.ini file however, I am not sure if it will give me the desired results.

I prefer to work with UTF-8 as I want to leave some room for development in the future.

THINGS I HAVE DONE SO FAR

1. I have made sure that my php, html charsets are utf-8 by setting the character sets in both the php header() and html meta tags.

2. I have attempted to use the following php.ini settings

[mbstring]
; language for internal character representation.
mbstring.language = Neutral
 
; internal/script encoding.
; Some encoding cannot work as internal encoding.
; (e.g. SJIS, BIG5, ISO-2022-*)
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
 
; http input encoding.
mbstring.http_input = "auto"
 
; http output encoding. mb_output_handler must be
; registered as output buffer to function
mbstring.http_output = UTF-8
 
; enable automatic encoding translation according to
; mbstring.internal_encoding setting. Input chars are
; converted to internal encoding by setting this to On.
; Note: Do _not_ use automatic encoding translation for
;       portable libs/applications.
mbstring.encoding_translation = On
 
; automatic encoding detection order.
; auto means
;mbstring.detect_order = auto
 
; substitute_character used when character cannot be converted
; one from another
;mbstring.substitute_character = none;
 
; overload(replace) single byte functions by mbstring functions.
; mail(), ereg(), etc are overloaded by mb_send_mail(), mb_ereg(),
; etc. Possible values are 0,1,2,4 or combination of them.
; For example, 7 for overload everything.
; 0: No overload
; 1: Overload mail() function
; 2: Overload str*() functions
; 4: Overload ereg*() functions
;mbstring.func_overload = 0
 
; enable strict encoding detection.
;mbstring.strict_encoding = Off
 

3. Replaced str functions with mbstr functions where necessary.

Is there anything else I MUST do or SHOULD do in order to make this application work the way I want it to?

(B)
Questions

I am an absolute newb in encodings, so I have a very newbish question. When I set the mbstring.internal_encoding to UTF-8, does that mean the encoding of the actual script is UTF-8?

I am also using mysql (planning to use mysqli later on). Are these functions safe to use with UTF-8?

I know this may be a big topic, and I am not expecting a complete answer, but any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

ENVIRONMENT:

OS: Windows XP MEDIA CENTRE (ENGLISH with IME)
PHP EDITOR: DREAMWEAVER CS3, ZEND STUDIO 5.5, and sometimes plan old NOTEPAD when I am not on my own computer.
SERVER: WAMP SERVER 2.0
HOST: Probably will use a shared hosting company

[pbmods]

Heya, Clai.

You should be good to go from there. PHP 6 will have greatly-enhanced Unicode support, but for now, you're doing all you can.

I am an absolute newb in encodings, so I have a very newbish question. When I set the mbstring.internal_encoding to UTF-8, does that mean the encoding of the actual script is UTF-8?

Nope. That one is set by your text editor.

I am also using mysql (planning to use mysqli later on). Are these functions safe to use with UTF-8?

Yup.

Be sure to set your connection encoding when you connect to MySQL:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf-8'", $conn);
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf-8'", $conn);