Solved: Fix for PHP Composer “????%” issue

July 28th, 2016

Warning: This post is 8 years old. Some of this information may be out of date.

I've had a problem on a few older projects where composer dies with “????%” after running composer update. The problem is that the PHP version is too old, usually a version of 5.3.x, and can't handle unicode correctly. So if you are seeing the following:

    composer update
    ????%

The fix for PHP Composer “????%” issue is:

    composer -ddetect_unicode=Off update

Of course, the better solution would be to upgrade your PHP version.