John Davidson

Message:

I have a string that has a charset of Windows-1252, it is pulled from a email body using php's imap functions:

$string = 'Great job—and a great decision';

I then try convert it to utf-8 to insert it into our mysql database:

$utf8_encoded = iconv('Windows-1252', "UTF-8//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", $string);

The output comes looking like this:

echo $utf8_encoded;

Great job—and a great decision

It would be great to convert it to utf-8 without the hyphen causing issues. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

I can't always assume the charset will be Windows-1252, I need a solution that will work no matter what charset the email comes in with.

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My Answer:
One possible solution is to use mb_convert_encoding instead of iconv. This function can automatically detect the input encoding and convert it to UTF-8. Here's how you can modify your code:

php
$string = 'Great job—and a great decision';
$utf8_encoded = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($string));

echo $utf8_encoded;


This should correctly convert the string to UTF-8 without any issues with special characters. Let me know if this works for you!