XML Parser Functions
PHP Manual

utf8_decode

Converts a string with ISO-8859-1 characters encoded with UTF-8 to single-byte ISO-8859-1

Description

string utf8_decode ( string $data )

This function converts the string data from the UTF-8 encoding to ISO-8859-1. Bytes in the string which are not valid UTF-8, and UTF-8 characters which do not exist in ISO-8859-1 (that is, characters above U+00FF) are replaced with ?.

Note:

Many web pages marked as using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding actually use the similar Windows-1252 encoding, and web browsers will interpret ISO-8859-1 web pages as Windows-1252. Windows-1252 features additional printable characters, such as the Euro sign (€) and curly quotes (“ ”), instead of certain ISO-8859-1 control characters. This function will not convert such Windows-1252 characters correctly. Use a different function if Windows-1252 conversion is required.

Parameters

data

A UTF-8 encoded string.

Return Values

Returns the ISO-8859-1 translation of data.

See Also

  • utf8_encode - Performs the reverse conversion
  • mb_convert_encoding - Converts between various character encodings, including UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252
  • iconv - Converts between various character encodings
  • recode_string - Converts between various character encodings