title: Setting the PHP default encoding to UTF-8
body: <p>In the &quot;PHP Cookbook&quot;, they say (p.589) that to properly set the character encoding of outgoing data to UTF-8, it is necessary to edit the <em>default_encoding</em> configuration to <em>utf-8</em>.</p>
  <p>However, I cannot find this configuration in file <em>php.ini</em>.  Should I simply add a line that would say <code>default_encoding = &quot;utf-8&quot;</code>?</p>
  <p>I do have a <em>;default_charset = &quot;iso-8859-1&quot;</em>.  As you can see (<code>;</code>), right now it is not activated.  Should I remove the semicolon and set it to <code>&quot;utf-8&quot;</code>?  Does that take care of the default encoding?</p>
  <p>I also found other encoding directives that I don't know what to do about:</p>
  <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>[iconv]
  ;iconv.input_encoding = ISO-8859-1
  ;iconv.internal_encoding = ISO-8859-1
  ;iconv.output_encoding = ISO-8859-1
  ...
  ; http://php.net/exif.encode-unicode
  ;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
  ...
  ;mssql.charset = &quot;ISO-8859-1&quot;
  ...
  ;exif.encode_unicode = ISO-8859-15
  </code></pre>
  <p>Is there any reason why I shouldn't simply replace them all with <code>utf-8</code>?</p>