I made a function that addresses all this issues. It´s called Encoding::toUTF8().

<?php
$text = $entity['Entity']['title'];
echo 'Original : ', $text."<br />";
echo 'Encoding::toUTF8 : ', Encoding::toUTF8($text)."<br />";
?>

Output:

Original : France Télécom
Encoding::toUTF8 : France Télécom

Original : Cond� Nast Publications
Encoding::toUTF8 : Condé Nast Publications

You dont need to know what the encoding of your strings is as long as you know it is either on Latin1 (iso 8859-1), Windows-1252 or UTF8. The string can have a mix of them too.

Encoding::toUTF8() will convert everything to UTF8.

I did it because a service was giving me a feed of data all messed up, mixing UTF8 and Latin1 in the same string.

Usage:

$utf8_string = Encoding::toUTF8($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

$latin1_string = Encoding::toLatin1($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

Download:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186012/PHP/forceUTF8.zip

I've included another function, Encoding::fixUFT8(), wich will fix every UTF8 string that looks garbled.

Usage:

$utf8_string = Encoding::fixUTF8($garbled_utf8_string);

Examples:

echo Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("FÃÂédÃÂération Camerounaise de Football");
echo Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football");

will output:

Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football

PHP does not care about string encoding generally, strings are binary data within PHP. So you must know the encoding of data inside the string if you need encoding. The question is: does encoding matter in your case?

If you set a string variables content to something like you did:

$string="ぁ";

It will not contain UTF-8. Instead it contains a binary sequence that is not a valid UTF-8 character. That's why the browser or editor displays a questionmark or similar. So before you go on, you already see that something might not be as intended. (Turned out it was a missing font on my end)

This also shows that your file in the editor is supporting UTF-8 or some other flavor of unicode encoding. Just keep the following in mind: One file - one encoding. If you store the string inside the file, it's in the encoding of that file. Check your editor in which encoding you save the file. Then you know the encoding of the string.

Let's just assume it is some valid UTF-8 like so (support for my font):

$string="ä";

You can then do a binary comparison of the string later on:

if ( 'ä' === $string )
  # do your stuff

Because it's in the same file and PHP strings are binary data, this works with every encoding. So normally you don't need to re-encode (change the encoding) the data if you use functions that are binary safe - which means that the encoding of the data is not changed.

For regular expressions encoding does play a role. That's why there is the u modifier to signal you want to make the expression work on and with unicode encoded data. However, if the data is already unicode encoded, you don't need to change it into unicode before you use preg_match. However with your code example, regular expressions are not necessary at all and a simple string comparison does the job.

Summary:

$string="ä";
if ( 'ä' === $string )
  # do your stuff