to test different combinations of convertions between charsets (when we don't know the source charset and what is the convenient destination charset) this is an example :
<?php
$tab = array("UTF-8", "ASCII", "Windows-1252", "ISO-8859-15", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-6", "CP1256");
$chain = "";
foreach ($tab as $i)
{
foreach ($tab as $j)
{
$chain .= " $i$j ".iconv($i, $j, "$my_string");
}
}
echo $chain;
?>
then after displaying, you use the $i$j that shows good displaying.
NB: you can add other charsets to $tab to test other cases.
