UTF-8 encoding breaks when upgrading PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0, fix PHP with ini_set( 'default_charset', "" ); or in your php.ini with default_charset = "".
Breaking HTML output with PHP 5.6 default_charset changed to UTF-8
Suppose you have the following lines in PHP code (don't ask me why you would want to do this...):
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<?php echo "éééééeeeeééé"; ?>
</body>
</html>
The PHP default charset setting in PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 prints the expected string on the screen: éééééeeeeééé.
In PHP 5.6 however, the default_charset is set to UTF-8, changing PHP's default charset, and PHP 5.6 will always print a Content-Type response header set to UTF-8:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
The PHP default charset set to UTF-8 breaks HTML output and functions like htmlentities() / htmlspecialchars() (PHP bug #61354), because the HTML charset ISO-8859-1 is printed too (creating a double Content-Type response header):
GET -uUsSed http://www.example.com/echo.php
GET http://www.example.com/echo.php
User-Agent: lwp-request/2.07
GET http://www.example.com/echo.php --> 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:03:50 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
Content-Length: 141
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Client-Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:03:50 GMT
Client-Peer: 77.94.251.244:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Don't turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, fix your PHP configuration
PHP.net writes:
If omitted, the default value of the encoding varies depending on the PHP version in use. In PHP 5.6 and later, the default_charset configuration option is used as the default value. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 will use UTF-8 as the default. Earlier versions of PHP use ISO-8859-1.
Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to specify the correct value for your code if you are using PHP 5.5 or earlier, or if your default_charset configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.
PHP.net htmlspecialchars()
How to fix the HTML output in PHP 5.6 - and up (7.0, 7.1)
The most obvious solution to this problem is: don't set a character set encoding in your HTML meta tag, e.g:
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
Other options to set a correct default character set (default_charset) are:
Create an user-defined php.ini to overrule default_charset directive
PHP supports user-defined php.ini files, in which you can overrule some php.ini settings. Neat! Upload your user-defined php.ini to your webroot containing the following line:
default_charset = ""
This will tell PHP to not send a Content-Type response header set to UTF-8.
Overrule PHP's default_charset with ini_set()
And last but not least, you can overrule this setting with PHP's ini_set() function:
ini_set( 'default_charset', "" );