Is youtube-dl not support special characters?

[deepnees]

Basically i just get title of video.

$title = exec("youtube-dl ".$url." --restrict-filenames -e");

but this not give special characters or non-english characters. just "�" giving. i want to get same title and description characters.
thanks.

[phihag]

youtube-dl supports special characters just fine. However, it looks like your application does not. This program fine for me:

<?php
echo exec('youtube-dl BaW_jenozKc -e');

Because you're not dealing with any files, --restrict-filenames has no effect, so it can be safely removed.

To diagnose your problem, make sure you use the same character encoding everywhere, if possible UTF-8. You can run youtube-dl with the -v option (and with -s instead of -e) to see your system's character encoding:

$ youtube-dl -s -v BaW_jenozKc
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-s', '-v', 'BaW_jenozKc']
[debug] Encodings: locale 'UTF-8', fs 'UTF-8', out 'UTF-8', pref: 'UTF-8'
[debug] youtube-dl version 2014.03.27.1
[debug] Git HEAD: 0dae508
[debug] Python version 2.7.6 - Linux-3.13-1-amd64-x86_64-with-debian-jessie-sid
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading webpage
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] BaW_jenozKc: Extracting video information

In the line starting with Encodings:, it should say UTF-8 everywhere. If it doesn't, there's your problem. Check your environment variables, in particular LC_ALL, which should end with .UTF-8.

Secondly, make sure that you don't mangle the title in your application. Just echoing should be fine. You can also pipe the output through htmlentities.

Thirdly, make sure that your website uses UTF-8. Its source code should contain the line

<meta charset="utf-8" />

By the way, you should really use escapeshellarg for the URL. Otherwise, you basically allow everyone who controls the $url variable to execute arbitrary code.