Like many other people, I have encountered massive problems when using iconv() to convert between encodings (from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15 in my case), especially on large strings.
The main problem here is that when your string contains illegal UTF-8 characters, there is no really straight forward way to handle those. iconv() simply (and silently!) terminates the string when encountering the problematic characters (also if using //IGNORE), returning a clipped string. The
<?php
$newstring = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($oldstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');
?>
workaround suggested here and elsewhere will also break when encountering illegal characters, at least dropping a useful note ("htmlentities(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in...")
I have found a lot of hints, suggestions and alternative methods (it's scary and in my opinion no good sign how many ways PHP natively provides to convert the encoding of strings), but none of them really worked, except for this one:
<?php
$newstring = mb_convert_encoding($oldstring, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');
?>
