PHP Manual: Convert string to requested character encoding

Description

string iconv ( string $in_charset , string $out_charset , string $str )

Performs a character set conversion on the string str from in_charset to out_charset.

Parameters

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, E_NOTICE is generated and the function will return FALSE.

Caution

If and how //TRANSLIT works exactly depends on the system's iconv() implementation (cf. ICONV_IMPL). Some implementations are known to ignore //TRANSLIT, so the conversion is likely to fail for characters which are illegal for the out_charset.

str

The string to be converted.

Return Values

Returns the converted string or FALSE on failure.

Changelog

Version	Description
5.4.0	Since this version, the function returns `FALSE` on illegal characters, unless //IGNORE is specified in output charset. Before, it returned partial output string.

Examples

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;

?>

The above example will output something similar to:

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