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From: Martin Kotulla <mk999@gmx.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.php
Subject: How do I force PHP to assume UTF-8 for $_GET?
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:32:34 +0200
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Hello,

I have a Windows application (which I cannot change) that calls my PHP 
script and passes it parameters via GET. The application sends properly 
encoded UTF-8 parameters, but does not indicate the UTF-8 character set 
in the HTTP headers (it does not indicate any character set at all).

When I now access the parameters via $_GET in my PHP script, they are 
interpreted as ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8.

For example, the Chinese character U+3563 is represented by the UTF-8 
bytes 0xE3, 0x95, 0xA3. PHP sees the two ISO-8859-1 character 0xE3 and 
0xA3, and silently drops 0x95, presumably because it is outside of the 
range of valid characters in ISO-8859-1.

So, how can I force PHP to regard the parameters as UTF-8-encoded?

Any insights appreciated.

-mk