If you need to strip as many national characters from UTF-8 as possible and keep the rest of input unchanged (i.e. convert whatever can be converted to ASCII and leave the rest), you can do it like this:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function clearUTF($s)
{
$r = '';
$s1 = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $s);
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($s1); $i++)
{
$ch1 = $s1[$i];
$ch2 = mb_substr($s, $i, 1);
$r .= $ch1=='?'?$ch2:$ch1;
}
return $r;
}
echo clearUTF('Šíleně žluťoučký Vašek úpěl olol! This will remain untranslated: ᾡᾧῘઍિ૮');
?>
Just remember you HAVE TO set locale to some unicode encoding to make iconv handle //TRANSLIT correctly!
