When doing transliteration, you have to make sure that your LC_COLLATE is properly set, otherwise the default POSIX will be used.
To transform "rené" into "rene" we could use the following code snippet:
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'nl_BE.utf8');
$string = 'rené';
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);
echo $string; // outputs rene
?>
iconv
(PHP 4 >= 4.0.5, PHP 5)
iconv — Convert string to requested character encoding
설명
Performs a character set conversion on the string str from in_charset to out_charset .
인수
- in_charset
-
The input charset.
- out_charset
-
The output charset.
If you append the string //TRANSLIT to out_charset transliteration is activated. This means that when a character can't be represented in the target charset, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. If you append the string //IGNORE, characters that cannot be represented in the target charset are silently discarded. Otherwise, str is cut from the first illegal character and an E_NOTICE is generated.
- str
-
The string to be converted.
반환값
Returns the converted string or FALSE on failure.
예제
Example #1 iconv() example
<?php
$text = "This is the Euro symbol '€'.";
echo 'Original : ', $text, PHP_EOL;
echo 'TRANSLIT : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'IGNORE : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'Plain : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $text), PHP_EOL;
?>
위 예제의 출력 예시:
Original : This is the Euro symbol '€'. TRANSLIT : This is the Euro symbol 'EUR'. IGNORE : This is the Euro symbol ''. Plain : Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in .\iconv-example.php on line 7 This is the Euro symbol '
iconv
08-Nov-2009 04:38
14-Oct-2009 08:53
to test different combinations of convertions between charsets (when we don't know the source charset and what is the convenient destination charset) this is an example :
<?php
$tab = array("UTF-8", "ASCII", "Windows-1252", "ISO-8859-15", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-6", "CP1256");
$chain = "";
foreach ($tab as $i)
{
foreach ($tab as $j)
{
$chain .= " $i$j ".iconv($i, $j, "$my_string");
}
}
echo $chain;
?>
then after displaying, you use the $i$j that shows good displaying.
NB: you can add other charsets to $tab to test other cases.
18-Sep-2009 03:53
mirek code, dated 16-May-2008 10:17, added the characters `^~'" to the output.
This function will strip out these extra characters:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function clearUTF($s)
{
$r = '';
$s1 = @iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $s);
$j = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($s1); $i++) {
$ch1 = $s1[$i];
$ch2 = @mb_substr($s, $j++, 1, 'UTF-8');
if (strstr('`^~\'"', $ch1) !== false) {
if ($ch1 <> $ch2) {
--$j;
continue;
}
}
$r .= ($ch1=='?') ? $ch2 : $ch1;
}
return $r;
}
?>
29-May-2009 07:33
For transcoding values in an Excel generated CSV the following seems to work:
<?php
$value = iconv('Windows-1252', 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $value);
?>
17-Apr-2009 01:33
Like many other people, I have encountered massive problems when using iconv() to convert between encodings (from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15 in my case), especially on large strings.
The main problem here is that when your string contains illegal UTF-8 characters, there is no really straight forward way to handle those. iconv() simply (and silently!) terminates the string when encountering the problematic characters (also if using //IGNORE), returning a clipped string. The
<?php
$newstring = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($oldstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');
?>
workaround suggested here and elsewhere will also break when encountering illegal characters, at least dropping a useful note ("htmlentities(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in...")
I have found a lot of hints, suggestions and alternative methods (it's scary and in my opinion no good sign how many ways PHP natively provides to convert the encoding of strings), but none of them really worked, except for this one:
<?php
$newstring = mb_convert_encoding($oldstring, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');
?>
03-Apr-2009 07:57
Here a very small but useful way to handle text files before further using them:
<?php
$in = file("/tmp/myfile.txt");
$out = fopen("/tmp/myfile.txt", "w");
foreach ($in as $line) {
fputs($out, iconv("UTF-8","ISO-8859-1", $line));}
?>
20-Feb-2009 09:50
You can use native iconv in Linux via passthru if all else failed.
Use the -c parameter to suppress error messages.
12-Feb-2009 08:20
I noticed that iconv might return not entire string, and no error. It happens when iconv encounters characters it doesn't know how to convert to certain encoding.
Simplest way to check how it works is:
<?php
$text=iconv('utf-8','iso-8859-2',$text);
$text=iconv('utf-8','iso-8859-2',$text);
?>
the result will be $text till first encounter of iso-8859-2 -specific char (such as ą / ź which already was converted to ± / Ľ ). It's quite hard to catch this error and brings a lot of trouble. I got it with converting greek alpha into iso-8859-2 (should be α but causes the error)
13-Nov-2008 07:08
If you have problems using iconv() for the simple conversion of UTF-8 European (extended Latin) characters to their Windows CP1252 equivalents, here's a quick hack that does the job:
// Zoe's iconv() replacement. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
function translateUTF8ToWindowsCP1252($string) {
$utf8 = array(
'€', // €
'’', // ’
'£', // £
'À', // À
'Á', // Á
'Â', // Â
'Ã', // Ã
'Ä', // Ä
'√Ö', // √Ö
'Æ', // Æ
'Ç', // Ç
'È', // È
'É', // É
'Ê', // Ê
'Ë', // Ë
'Ì', // Ì
'Í', // Í
'Î', // Î
'Ï', // Ï
'Ð', // Ð
'Ñ', // Ñ
'Ò', // Ò
'Ó', // Ó
'Ô', // Ô
'Õ', // Õ
'Ö', // Ö
'√ó', // √ó
'√ò', // √ò
'√ô', // √ô
'√ö', // √ö
'√õ', // √õ
'√ú', // √ú
'√ù', // √ù
'√û', // √û
'ß', // ß
'à', // à
'√°', // √°
'√¢', // √¢
'√£', // √£
'√§', // √§
'å', // å
'√¶', // √¶
'ç', // ç
'è', // è
'é', // é
'ê', // ê
'ë', // ë
'ì', // ì
'í', // í
'î', // î
'ï', // ï
'√∞', // √∞
'ñ', // ñ
'ò', // ò
'ó', // ó
'ô', // ô
'õ', // õ
'ö', // ö
'√∑', // √∑
'√∏', // √∏
'√π', // √π
'√∫', // √∫
'û', // û
'ü', // ü
'√Ω', // √Ω
'þ', // þ
'ÿ', // ÿ
);
$cp1252 = array(
chr(128), // €
chr(146), // ’
chr(163), // £
chr(192), // À
chr(193), // Á
chr(194), // Â
chr(195), // Ã
chr(196), // Ä
chr(197), // √Ö
chr(198), // Æ
chr(199), // Ç
chr(200), // È
chr(201), // É
chr(202), // Ê
chr(203), // Ë
chr(204), // Ì
chr(205), // Í
chr(206), // Î
chr(207), // Ï
chr(208), // Ð
chr(209), // Ñ
chr(210), // Ò
chr(211), // Ó
chr(212), // Ô
chr(213), // Õ
chr(214), // Ö
chr(215), // √ó
chr(216), // √ò
chr(217), // √ô
chr(218), // √ö
chr(219), // √õ
chr(220), // √ú
chr(221), // √ù
chr(222), // √û
chr(223), // ß
chr(224), // à
chr(225), // √°
chr(226), // √¢
chr(227), // √£
chr(228), // √§
chr(229), // å
chr(230), // √¶
chr(231), // ç
chr(232), // è
chr(233), // é
chr(234), // ê
chr(235), // ë
chr(236), // ì
chr(237), // í
chr(238), // î
chr(239), // ï
chr(240), // √∞
chr(241), // ñ
chr(242), // ò
chr(243), // ó
chr(244), // ô
chr(245), // õ
chr(246), // ö
chr(247), // √∑
chr(248), // √∏
chr(249), // √π
chr(250), // √∫
chr(251), // û
chr(252), // ü
chr(253), // √Ω
chr(254), // þ
chr(255), // ÿ
);
return str_replace($utf8, $cp1252, $string);
}
10-Nov-2008 11:35
I used to have problems with Latin characters in UTF-8 while exporting text to PEAR xls writer.
This little conmbination solved my problem, you might want to try something like that:
<?php
function convert_locale_for_xls ($text) {
$return = iconv('UTF-8', 'cp1250', $text);
return preg_replace("/([\xC2\xC4])([\x80-\xBF])/e", "chr(ord('\\1')<<6&0xC0|ord('\\2')&0x3F)", $return);
}
?>
02-Oct-2008 03:10
If you are getting question-marks in your iconv output when transliterating, be sure to 'setlocale' to something your system supports.
Some PHP CMS's will default setlocale to 'C', this can be a problem.
use the "locale" command to find out a list..
$ locale -a
C
en_AU.utf8
POSIX
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_AU.utf8');
$str = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Côte d'Ivoire");
?>
29-May-2008 07:48
There is a little problem with iconv in such using:
$mytext = iconv('windows-1251', 'utf-8', $mytext);
echo $mytext;
This code isn't work correctly. Solution is:
$mytext_utf = iconv('windows-1251', 'utf-8', $mytext);
echo $mytext_utf;
//or just
echo iconv('windows-1251', 'utf-8', $mytext);
16-May-2008 07:17
If you need to strip as many national characters from UTF-8 as possible and keep the rest of input unchanged (i.e. convert whatever can be converted to ASCII and leave the rest), you can do it like this:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function clearUTF($s)
{
$r = '';
$s1 = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $s);
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($s1); $i++)
{
$ch1 = $s1[$i];
$ch2 = mb_substr($s, $i, 1);
$r .= $ch1=='?'?$ch2:$ch1;
}
return $r;
}
echo clearUTF('Šíleně žluťoučký Vašek úpěl olol! This will remain untranslated: ᾡᾧῘઍિ૮');
//outputs Silene zlutoucky Vasek upel olol! This will remain untranslated: ᾡᾧῘઍિ૮
?>
Just remember you HAVE TO set locale to some unicode encoding to make iconv handle //TRANSLIT correctly!
28-Apr-2008 02:15
iconv seems to have problems with russian "Ё" letter. If the string contains this letter, after calling iconv() you get the string where everything after "Ё" is missing. Make sure to replace all these characters before using iconv()
01-Mar-2008 11:44
So, as iconv() does not always work correctly, in most cases, much easier to use htmlentities().
Example: <?php $content=htmlentities(file_get_contents("incoming.txt"), ENT_QUOTES, "Windows-1252"); file_put_contents("outbound.txt", html_entity_decode($content, ENT_QUOTES , "utf-8")); ?>
03-Feb-2008 03:40
function detectUTF8($string)
{
return preg_match('%(?:
[\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF] # non-overlong 2-byte
|\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF] # excluding overlongs
|[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # straight 3-byte
|\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF] # excluding surrogates
|\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # planes 1-3
|[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3} # planes 4-15
|\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2} # plane 16
)+%xs', $string);
}
function cp1251_utf8( $sInput )
{
$sOutput = "";
for ( $i = 0; $i < strlen( $sInput ); $i++ )
{
$iAscii = ord( $sInput[$i] );
if ( $iAscii >= 192 && $iAscii <= 255 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1040 + ( $iAscii - 192 ) ).";";
else if ( $iAscii == 168 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1025 ).";";
else if ( $iAscii == 184 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1105 ).";";
else
$sOutput .= $sInput[$i];
}
return $sOutput;
}
function encoding($string){
if (function_exists('iconv')) {
if (@!iconv('utf-8', 'cp1251', $string)) {
$string = iconv('cp1251', 'utf-8', $string);
}
return $string;
} else {
if (detectUTF8($string)) {
return $string;
} else {
return cp1251_utf8($string);
}
}
}
echo encoding($string);
05-Nov-2007 10:01
To strip bogus characters from your input (such as data from an unsanitized or other source which you can't trust to necessarily give you strings encoded according to their advertised encoding set), use the same character set as both the input and the output, with //IGNORE on the output charcter set.
<?php
// assuming '†' is actually UTF8, htmlentities will assume it's iso-8859
// since we did not specify in the 3rd argument of htmlentities.
// This generates "â[bad utf-8 character]"
// If passed to any libxml, it will generate a fatal error.
$badUTF8 = htmlentities('†');
// iconv() can ignore characters which cannot be encoded in the target character set
$goodUTF8 = iconv("utf-8", "utf-8//IGNORE", $badUTF8);
?>
The result of the example does not give you back the dagger character which was the original input (it got lost when htmlentities was misused to encode it incorrectly, though this is common from people not accustomed to dealing with extended character sets), but it does at least give you data which is sane in your target character set.
24-Aug-2007 06:19
In my case, I had to change:
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
?>
to
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ.UTF-8');
?>
Otherwise it returns question marks.
When I asked my linux for locale (by locale command) it returns "cs_CZ.UTF-8", so there is maybe correlation between it.
iconv (GNU libc) 2.6.1
glibc 2.3.6
15-Jun-2007 01:08
Ritchie's example
<?
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
?>
dasn't output `Zlutoucky kun`, but `Zlutouck'y kun`
25-Mar-2007 09:11
Please note that iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', ...) doesn't work properly when locale category LC_CTYPE is set to C or POSIX. You must choose another locale otherwise all non-ASCII characters will be replaced with question marks. This is at least true with glibc 2.5.
Example:
<?php
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'POSIX');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
// ?lu?ou?k? k??
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'cs_CZ');
echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Žluťoučký kůň\n");
// Zlutoucky kun
?>
09-Mar-2007 05:28
Many mail servers don't handle utf-8 correctly as they assume iso-8859-x encodings, so you would want to convert the headers, subject and body of an email prior to sending it out.
If iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() are missing the following function can be used to convert UTF8 to iso-8859-7 encoding. It discards all characters that are not 2-byte greek characters or single-byte (ascii).
<?php
function conv_utf8_iso8859_7($s) {
$len = strlen($s);
$out = "";
$curr_char = "";
for($i=0; $i < $len; $i++) {
$curr_char .= $s[$i];
if( ( ord($s[$i]) & (128+64) ) == 128) {
//character end found
if ( strlen($curr_char) == 2) {
// 2-byte character check for it is greek one and convert
if (ord($curr_char[0])==205) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+16 );
else if (ord($curr_char[0])==206) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+48 );
else if (ord($curr_char[0])==207) $out .= chr( ord($curr_char[1])+112 );
else ; // non greek 2-byte character, discard character
} else ;// n-byte character, n>2, discard character
$curr_char = "";
} else if (ord($s[$i]) < 128) {
// character is one byte (ascii)
$out .= $curr_char;
$curr_char = "";
}
}
return $out;
}
?>
16-Nov-2006 05:36
The following are Microsoft encodings that are based on ISO-8859 but with the addition of those stupid control characters.
CP1250 is Eastern European (not ISO-8859-2)
CP1251 is Cyrillic (not ISO-8859-5)
CP1252 is Western European (not ISO-8859-1)
CP1253 is Greek (not ISO-8859-7)
CP1254 is Turkish (not ISO-8859-9)
CP1255 is Hebrew (not ISO-8859-8)
CP1256 is Arabic (not ISO-8859-6)
CP1257 is Baltic (not ISO-8859-4)
If you know you're getting input from a Windows machine with those encodings, use one of these as a parameter to iconv.
14-Dec-2005 06:17
If you get this error message: "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in file.php on line x", and your text or database is likely to contain text copied from Microsoft Word documents, it's very likely that the error is because of the evil 0x96 "long dash" character. MS Word as default converts all double hyphens into this illegal character. The solution is either to convert 0x96 (dash) into the regular 0x2d (hyphen/minus), or to append the //TRANSLIT or //IGNORE parameters (se above).
24-Nov-2005 08:29
Didn't know its a feature or not but its works for me (PHP 5.0.4)
iconv('', 'UTF-8', $str)
test it to convert from windows-1251 (stored in DB) to UTF-8 (which i use for web pages).
BTW i convert each array i fetch from DB with array_walk_recursive...
30-May-2005 07:23
<?php
//script from http://zizi.kxup.com/
//javascript unesape
function unescape($str) {
$str = rawurldecode($str);
preg_match_all("/(?:%u.{4})|&#x.{4};|&#\d+;|.+/U",$str,$r);
$ar = $r[0];
print_r($ar);
foreach($ar as $k=>$v) {
if(substr($v,0,2) == "%u")
$ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("H4",substr($v,-4)));
elseif(substr($v,0,3) == "&#x")
$ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("H4",substr($v,3,-1)));
elseif(substr($v,0,2) == "&#") {
echo substr($v,2,-1)."<br>";
$ar[$k] = iconv("UCS-2","UTF-8",pack("n",substr($v,2,-1)));
}
}
return join("",$ar);
}
?>
01-Feb-2005 08:27
Here is how to convert UTF-8 numbers to UCS-2 numbers in hex:
<?php
function utf8toucs2($str)
{
for ($i=0;$i<strlen($str);$i+=2)
{
$substring1 = $str[$i].$str[$i+1];
$substring2 = $str[$i+2].$str[$i+3];
if (hexdec($substring1) < 127)
$results = "00".$str[$i].$str[$i+1];
else
{
$results = dechex((hexdec($substring1)-192)*64 + (hexdec($substring2)-128));
if ($results < 1000) $results = "0".$results;
$i+=2;
}
$ucs2 .= $results;
}
return $ucs2;
}
echo strtoupper(utf8toucs2("D985D8B1D8AD"))."\n";
echo strtoupper(utf8toucs2("456725"))."\n";
?>
Input:
D985D8B1D8AD
Output:
06450631062D
Input:
456725
Output:
004500670025
28-Jan-2005 05:49
convert windows-1255 to utf-8 with the following code
<?php
$heb = 'put hebrew text here';
$utf = preg_replace("/([\xE0-\xFA])/e","chr(215).chr(ord(\${1})-80)",$heb);
?>
19-Jan-2005 08:02
Here is how to convert UCS-2 numbers to UTF-8 numbers in hex:
function ucs2toutf8($str)
{
for ($i=0;$i<strlen($str);$i+=4)
{
$substring1 = $str[$i].$str[$i+1];
$substring2 = $str[$i+2].$str[$i+3];
if ($substring1 == "00")
{
$byte1 = "";
$byte2 = $substring2;
}
else
{
$substring = $substring1.$substring2;
$byte1 = dechex(192+(hexdec($substring)/64));
$byte2 = dechex(128+(hexdec($substring)%64));
}
$utf8 .= $byte1.$byte2;
}
return $utf8;
}
echo strtoupper(ucs2toutf8("06450631062D0020"));
?>
Input:
06450631062D
Output:
D985D8B1D8AD
regards,
Ziyad
11-Dec-2004 04:15
<? // it's only example
function CP1251toUTF8($string){
$out = '';
for ($i = 0; $i<strlen($string); ++$i){
$ch = ord($string{$i});
if ($ch < 0x80) $out .= chr($ch);
else
if ($ch >= 0xC0)
if ($ch < 0xF0)
$out .= "\xD0".chr(0x90 + $ch - 0xC0); // А-Я, а-п (A-YA, a-p)
else $out .= "\xD1".chr(0x80 + $ch - 0xF0); // р-я (r-ya)
else
switch($ch){
case 0xA8: $out .= "\xD0\x81"; break; // YO
case 0xB8: $out .= "\xD1\x91"; break; // yo
// ukrainian
case 0xA1: $out .= "\xD0\x8E"; break; // Ў (U)
case 0xA2: $out .= "\xD1\x9E"; break; // ў (u)
case 0xAA: $out .= "\xD0\x84"; break; // Є (e)
case 0xAF: $out .= "\xD0\x87"; break; // Ї (I..)
case 0xB2: $out .= "\xD0\x86"; break; // I (I)
case 0xB3: $out .= "\xD1\x96"; break; // i (i)
case 0xBA: $out .= "\xD1\x94"; break; // є (e)
case 0xBF: $out .= "\xD1\x97"; break; // ї (i..)
// chuvashian
case 0x8C: $out .= "\xD3\x90"; break; // Ӑ (A)
case 0x8D: $out .= "\xD3\x96"; break; // Ӗ (E)
case 0x8E: $out .= "\xD2\xAA"; break; // Ҫ (SCH)
case 0x8F: $out .= "\xD3\xB2"; break; // Ӳ (U)
case 0x9C: $out .= "\xD3\x91"; break; // ӑ (a)
case 0x9D: $out .= "\xD3\x97"; break; // ӗ (e)
case 0x9E: $out .= "\xD2\xAB"; break; // ҫ (sch)
case 0x9F: $out .= "\xD3\xB3"; break; // ӳ (u)
}
}
return $out;
}
?>
30-Nov-2004 01:20
For those who have troubles in displaying UCS-2 data on browser, here's a simple function that convert ucs2 to html unicode entities :
<?php
function ucs2html($str) {
$str=trim($str); // if you are reading from file
$len=strlen($str);
$html='';
for($i=0;$i<$len;$i+=2)
$html.='&#'.hexdec(dechex(ord($str[$i+1])).
sprintf("%02s",dechex(ord($str[$i])))).';';
return($html);
}
?>
18-Nov-2004 06:14
Here is an example how to convert windows-1251 (windows) or cp1251(Linux/Unix) encoded string to UTF-8 encoding.
<?php
function cp1251_utf8( $sInput )
{
$sOutput = "";
for ( $i = 0; $i < strlen( $sInput ); $i++ )
{
$iAscii = ord( $sInput[$i] );
if ( $iAscii >= 192 && $iAscii <= 255 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1040 + ( $iAscii - 192 ) ).";";
else if ( $iAscii == 168 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1025 ).";";
else if ( $iAscii == 184 )
$sOutput .= "&#".( 1105 ).";";
else
$sOutput .= $sInput[$i];
}
return $sOutput;
}
?>
16-Nov-2004 04:53
On some systems there may be no such function as iconv(); this is due to the following reason: a constant is defined named `iconv` with the value `libiconv`. So, the string PHP_FUNCTION(iconv) transforms to PHP_FUNCTION(libiconv), and you have to call libiconv() function instead of iconv().
I had seen this on FreeBSD, but I am sure that was a rather special build.
If you'd want not to be dependent on this behaviour, add the following to your script:
<?php
if (!function_exists('iconv') && function_exists('libiconv')) {
function iconv($input_encoding, $output_encoding, $string) {
return libiconv($input_encoding, $output_encoding, $string);
}
}
?>
Thanks to tony2001 at phpclub.net for explaining this behaviour.
23-Jun-2004 12:10
Here is a code to convert ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 and vice versa without using iconv.
<?php
//Logic from http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/InternationalisationUTF8
$str_iso8859_1 = 'foo in ISO 8859-1';
//ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
$str_utf8 = preg_replace("/([\x80-\xFF])/e",
"chr(0xC0|ord('\\1')>>6).chr(0x80|ord('\\1')&0x3F)",
$str_iso8859_1);
//UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1
$str_iso8859_1 = preg_replace("/([\xC2\xC3])([\x80-\xBF])/e",
"chr(ord('\\1')<<6&0xC0|ord('\\2')&0x3F)",
$str_utf8);
?>
HTH,
R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah
