How to convert these strange characters? (ë, Ã, ì, ù, Ã)

Question

My page often shows things like ë, Ã, ì, ù, à in place of normal characters.

I use utf8 for header page and MySQL encode. How does this happen?

Answer 1

These are utf-8 encoded characters. Use utf8_decode() to convert them to normal ISO-8859-1 characters.

Answer 2

If you see those characters you probably just didn’t specify the character encoding properly. Because those characters are the result when an UTF-8 multi-byte string is interpreted with a single-byte encoding like ISO 8859-1 or Windows-1252.

In this case ë could be encoded with 0xC3 0xAB that represents the Unicode character ë (U+00EB) in UTF-8.