PHP function imagettftext() and unicode

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I have been having the same problem with a script that will render text in an image and output it. Problem was, that due to different browsers (or code hardiness/paranoia, whichever way you want to think of it), I had no way of knowing what encoding was being put inside the $_GET array.

Here is how I solved the problem.

$item_text = $_GET['text'];

# detect if the string was passed in as unicode
$text_encoding = mb_detect_encoding($item_text, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1');
# make sure it's in unicode
if ($text_encoding != 'UTF-8') {
    $item_text = mb_convert_encoding($item_text, 'UTF-8', $text_encoding);
}

# html numerically-escape everything (&#[dec];)
$item_text = mb_encode_numericentity($item_text,
    array (0x0, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff), 'UTF-8');

This solves any problem with imagettftext not being able to handle characters above #127 by simply changing ALL the characters (including multibyte Unicode characters) into their HTML numeric character entity—”A” for “A”, “B” for “B”, etc.—which the manual page claims support for.

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