There may be situations when a new version of a web site, all in UTF-8, has to display some old data remaining in the database with ISO-8859-1 accents. The problem is iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $string) should not be applied if $string is already UTF-8 encoded.
I use this function that does'nt need any extension :
function convert_utf8( $string ) {
if ( strlen(utf8_decode($string)) == strlen($string) ) {
// $string is not UTF-8
return iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $string);
} else {
// already UTF-8
return $string;
}
}
I have not tested it extensively, hope it may help.