International PHP Conference Berlin 2025

Summaries of supported encodings

Summaries of supported encodings
Name in the IANA character set registry Underlying character set Description Additional note
ISO-10646-UCS-4 ISO 10646 The Universal Character Set with 31-bit code space, standardized as UCS-4 by ISO/IEC 10646. It is kept synchronized with the latest version of the Unicode code map. If this name is used in the encoding conversion facility, the converter attempts to identify by the preceding BOM (byte order mark)in which endian the subsequent bytes are represented.
ISO-10646-UCS-4 UCS-4 See above. In contrast to UCS-4, strings are always assumed to be in big endian form.
ISO-10646-UCS-4 UCS-4 See above. In contrast to UCS-4, strings are always assumed to be in little endian form.
ISO-10646-UCS-2 UCS-2 The Universal Character Set with 16-bit code space, standardized as UCS-2 by ISO/IEC 10646. It is kept synchronized with the latest version of the unicode code map. If this name is used in the encoding conversion facility, the converter attempts to identify by the preceding BOM (byte order mark)in which endian the subsequent bytes are represented.
ISO-10646-UCS-2 UCS-2 See above. In contrast to UCS-2, strings are always assumed to be in big endian form.
ISO-10646-UCS-2 UCS-2 See above. In contrast to UCS-2, strings are always assumed to be in little endian form.
UTF-32 Unicode Unicode Transformation Format of 32-bit unit width, whose encoding space refers to the Unicode's codeset standard. This encoding scheme wasn't identical to UCS-4 because the code space of Unicode were limited to a 21-bit value. If this name is used in the encoding conversion facility, the converter attempts to identify by the preceding BOM (byte order mark)in which endian the subsequent bytes are represented.
UTF-32BE Unicode See above In contrast to UTF-32, strings are always assumed to be in big endian form.
UTF-32LE Unicode See above In contrast to UTF-32, strings are always assumed to be in little endian form.
UTF-16 Unicode Unicode Transformation Format of 16-bit unit width. It's worth a note that UTF-16 is no longer the same specification as UCS-2 because the surrogate mechanism has been introduced since Unicode 2.0 and UTF-16 now refers to a 21-bit code space. If this name is used in the encoding conversion facility, the converter attempts to identify by the preceding BOM (byte order mark)in which endian the subsequent bytes are represented.
UTF-16BE Unicode See above. In contrast to UTF-16, strings are always assumed to be in big endian form.
UTF-16LE Unicode See above. In contrast to UTF-16, strings are always assumed to be in little endian form.
UTF-8 Unicode / UCS Unicode Transformation Format of 8-bit unit width. none
UTF-7 Unicode A mail-safe transformation format of Unicode, specified in » RFC2152. none
(none) Unicode A variant of UTF-7 which is specialized for use in the » IMAP protocol. none
US-ASCII (preferred MIME name) / iso-ir-6 / ANSI_X3.4-1986 / ISO_646.irv:1991 / ASCII / ISO646-US / us / IBM367 / CP367 / csASCII ASCII / ISO 646 American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a commonly-used 7-bit encoding. Also standardized as an international standard, ISO 646. (none)
EUC-JP (preferred MIME name) / Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese / csEUCPkdFmtJapanese Compound of US-ASCII / JIS X0201:1997 (hankaku kana part) / JIS X0208:1990 / JIS X0212:1990 As you see the name is derived from an abbreviation of Extended UNIX Code Packed Format for Japanese, this encoding is mostly used on UNIX or alike platforms. The original encoding scheme, Extended UNIX Code, is designed on the basis of ISO 2022. The character set referred to by EUC-JP is different to IBM932 / CP932, which are used by OS/2® and Microsoft® Windows®. For information interchange with those platforms, use EUCJP-WIN instead.
Shift_JIS (preferred MIME name) / MS_Kanji / csShift_JIS Compound of JIS X0201:1997 / JIS X0208:1997 Shift_JIS was developed in early 80's, at the time personal Japanese word processors were brought into the market, in order to maintain compatibilities with the legacy encoding scheme JIS X 0201:1976. According to the IANA definition the codeset of Shift_JIS is slightly different to IBM932 / CP932. However, the names "SJIS" / "Shift_JIS" are often wrongly used to refer to these codesets. For the CP932 codemap, use SJIS-WIN instead.
(none) Compound of JIS X0201:1997 / JIS X0208:1997 / IBM extensions / NEC extensions While this "encoding" uses the same encoding scheme as EUC-JP, the underlying character set is different. That is, some code points map to different characters than EUC-JP. none
Windows-31J / csWindows31J Compound of JIS X0201:1997 / JIS X0208:1997 / IBM extensions / NEC extensions While this "encoding" uses the same encoding scheme as Shift_JIS, the underlying character set is different. That means some code points map to different characters than Shift_JIS. (none)
ISO-2022-JP (preferred MIME name) / csISO2022JP US-ASCII / JIS X0201:1976 / JIS X0208:1978 / JIS X0208:1983 » RFC1468 (none)
JIS
ISO-8859-1
ISO-8859-2
ISO-8859-3
ISO-8859-4
ISO-8859-5
ISO-8859-6
ISO-8859-7
ISO-8859-8
ISO-8859-9
ISO-8859-10
ISO-8859-13
ISO-8859-14
ISO-8859-15
ISO-8859-16
byte2be
byte2le
byte4be
byte4le
BASE64
HTML-ENTITIES
7bit
8bit
EUC-CN
CP936
HZ
EUC-TW
CP950
BIG-5
EUC-KR
UHC (CP949)
ISO-2022-KR
Windows-1251 (CP1251)
Windows-1252 (CP1252)
CP866 (IBM866)
KOI8-R
KOI8-U
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