Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later. Charset Aliases Description ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1 ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish letters missing in Latin-1(ISO-8859-1). UTF-8 ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode. cp866 ibm866, 866 DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European. KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. BIG5 950 Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan. GB2312 936 Simplified Chinese, national standard character set. BIG5-HKSCS Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese. Shift_JIS SJIS, 932 Japanese EUC-JP EUCJP Japanese Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.