PHP Function Iconv
If you're dealing with a multi-language script and need to convert characters, then php function iconv can be very useful. It's a standard conversion application programming interface that will transfer the character set of an input string from one encoding to another using Unicode character encoding. The iconv library is available in many Linux distributions and is also used by a number of other programs that use different text encodings internally.
There are a few caveats to consider. First, you'll need a system that is a recent POSIX-compliant operating system with a standard C library supplied in it which should provide the iconv facility. Then, you'll need to make sure that your php binary has been configured with a flag to enable it (php -o 'configure') and to have the GNU libiconv utility installed on the machine.
Then, you should set the LC_CTYPE locale category to the appropriate value for the language or character encoding that you want the iconv to use. This is very important, as the'standard' ISO-8859-1 encoding will not work well with iconv. It will end up with all non-ASCII characters being replaced by question marks! You should try to choose a more appropriate encoding, such as UTF-8 or ISO-8859-2.
The other thing to be aware of is that the iconv functions do not work with a'standard' HTML encoding. This is because the'standard' HTML encoding does not contain a lot of the characters that are commonly used in most languages, such as umlauted vowels and diacritics.