title: How do I disable Multibyte string input conversion in PHP?
body: <p>I am attempting to install <code>Drupal 7</code> on my local <code>debian jessie</code> machine, and it is telling me the following:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Multibyte string input conversion in PHP is active and must be
    disabled. Check the php.ini mbstring.http_input setting. Please refer
    to the PHP mbstring documentation for more information.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Ok, so I head over to the <a href="http://au1.php.net/mbstring" rel="nofollow">php documentation linked in that message</a> and it provides me with a lot of (helpful, I am sure) information not at all related to disabling "Multibyte string input conversion". If it's there, I didn't find it.</p>
  
  <p>I googled and came up with <a href="https://www.drupal.org/node/132723" rel="nofollow">a thread on drupal.org</a>, which claims:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Since Drupal made it mandatory to disable mbstring.http_input and its
    'relatives', a lot complaints regarding Drupal installation was raised
    everywhere in cyberspace. It's not a problem if you own your own
    server, and there's a lot of workaround.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>And <a href="https://www.drupal.org/node/87138" rel="nofollow">provides a link</a> to a page that I add the following to my <code>.htaccess</code> file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>php_value mbstring.http_input pass
  php_value mbstring.http_output pass
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So I had a look in my <code>.htaccess</code> file and found this:</p>
  
  <pre><code># PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2.                                                        
  &lt;IfModule mod_php5.c&gt;                                                           
    php_flag magic_quotes_gpc                 off                                 
    php_flag magic_quotes_sybase              off                                 
    php_flag register_globals                 off                                 
    php_flag session.auto_start               off                                 
    php_value mbstring.http_input             pass                                
    php_value mbstring.http_output            pass                                
    php_flag mbstring.encoding_translation    off                                 
  &lt;/IfModule&gt;                    
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Right, so now what?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> Just added the following line to my php.ini file:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>mbstring.http_input = pass    ; No conversion.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>and ran <code>service apache2 reload</code>. No effect.</p>