How Can I Convert Characters Between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in PHP?

Converting Characters Between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in PHP

Combining scripts with different character encodings can pose challenges. In such scenarios, you may encounter the need to convert characters from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 or vice versa.

Conversion from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

• iconv() and mb_convert_encoding(): These functions provide a simple and straightforward solution for converting between character encodings. The syntax for iconv() is iconv(to_encoding, from_encoding, string) and for mb_convert_encoding() is mb_convert_encoding(string, to_encoding, from_encoding). Both can be used for the conversion you require.
• utf8_encode() and utf8_decode(): These functions are designed to convert between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 specifically. However, they operate in reverse order, with utf8_encode() converting from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and utf8_decode() converting from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1. Therefore, you can use these functions if the input is already in ISO-8859-1 and needs to be converted to UTF-8.

Conversion from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8

• iconv(), mb_convert_encoding(), and utf8_encode(): The same functions used for the conversion to ISO-8859-1 can be employed for the conversion back to UTF-8. Simply swap the "to" and "from" arguments when calling these functions.

It's important to note that while ISO-8859-1 is a single-byte character encoding, UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. This means that some characters that cannot be represented in ISO-8859-1 may need to be represented as multiple bytes in UTF-8. Therefore, it's crucial to ensure that the characters in your strings can be adequately represented in the target encoding to avoid potential issues.

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