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when you have a charset different of UTF-8 and you need to put it on JSON format to migrate it to a DB, there are two methods that can be used in PHP, calling utf8_encode() and iconv(). I would like to know which one have better performance, and when is convenient to use one or another.
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The iconv() function converts a sequence of characters in one character encoding to a sequence of characters in another character encoding.
Iconv converts character encoding by setting a unique number for every character. The module contains an interface to iconv character set conversion facility. We use this module to transfer the character set of a string from a local character set to another character set.
The utf8_encode() function is an inbuilt function in PHP which is used to encode an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8. Unicode has been developed to describe all possible characters of all languages and includes a lot of symbols with one unique number for each symbol/character.
Definition and Usage. The utf8_encode() function encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8. Unicode is a universal standard, and has been developed to describe all possible characters of all languages plus a lot of symbols with one unique number for each character/symbol.
when you have a charset different of UTF-8
Nope - utf8_encode() is suitable only for converting a ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8. Iconv provides a vast number of source and target encodings.
Re performance, I have no idea how utf8_encode() works internally and what libraries it uses, but my prediction is there won't be much of a difference - at least not on "normal" amounts of data in the bytes or kilobytes. If in doubt, do a benchmark.
I tend to use iconv() because it's clearer that there is a conversion from character set A to character set B.
Also, iconv() provides more detailed control on what to do when it encounters invalid data. Adding //IGNORE to the target character set will cause it to silently drop invalid characters. This may be helpful in certain situations.
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