UTF-16 PHP String to UTF-8

Question

I have a string on a variable $str after successfully decrypting AES cipher with mcrypt_decrypt. If I try to print str to screen, I do notice that it has a blank space between each letter, that actually is a NULL termination (\x00) given by UTF-16 character encoding.

Array ( [1] => 33 [2] => 0 [3] => 34 [4] => 0 [5] => 35 [6] => 0 ... )

I've tried many ways to turn it into UTF-8 but I failed. What can I do?

Answer 1

You should use mb-convert-encoding function

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-8" , "UTF-16LE");