Encoding problem with node.tpl.php

Question

I am new in Drupal theming and I would like to control the "submitted by" part of a node. I want to remove the name of the author and stylize the created_date of the node. The problem is that I also echo some greek characters that show up in weird symbols in my site. I tried changing the encoding to utf-8 but it won't work. I am not even sure what the original encoding of node.tpl.php is. How would I go inserting my own custom text inside node.tpl.php and printing it correctly?

<?php if ($display_submitted): ?>
  <footer class="submitted"><?php $posted="Δημοσιεύτηκε στις "; echo mb_convert_encoding($posted, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252") . date( "d F, Y",$node->created); ?></footer>
<?php endif; ?>

The code above returns:

Äçìïóéåýôçêå óôéò 12 January, 2012

I also tried utf8_encode function but that was a long shot since it converts ISO-8859-1 strings to UTF-8.

Answer 1

If the file is correctly saved as UTF-8, it should correctly handle Unicode characters. So far, I have had a problem with the saved file just because the editor I was using added the BOM ("Byte Order Mark") used to identify the encoding of the file, but the error was a different one.

Generally speaking, the Drupal way to have a translatable site is to use t() in your code, which requires the English string that will then be translated to the language set as default, basing on the translation provided to the Language module.

The code should be rather be similar to the following one:

<?php if ($display_submitted): ?>
  <footer class="submitted"><?php t('Submitted by !username on !datetime', array('!username' => $name, '!datetime' => $date)););</footer>
<?php endif; ?>

The alternative is implementing hook_preprocess_node(&$variables) (template_preprocess_page() in a theme), and initialize the variable $variables['submitted'] to the string you want to appear ("Submitted by !username on !datetime" in the code I shown before).

Answer 2

You might want to try the submitted_by module. Since all entered strings go through the Drupal system you shouldn't need to use any encoding functions in your template.