Newbie question: replacing truetype fonts with UTF8 encoded Unicode characters

Greetings I have some HTML text using truetype fonts which i have to convert to UTF8 encoded unicode characters. I am just trying to replace the truetype font characters. The problem is that somehow the HTML tags also get converted to UTF8 :-( I do a lot of str_replace such as the following: $body = str_replace("þ", "க்ஷ", $body); $body = str_replace("þ£", "க்ஷா", $body); $body = str_replace("¬þ", "க்ஷை", $body); $body = str_replace("V", "க்ஷி", $body); $body = str_replace("r", "க்ஷீ", $body); $body = str_replace("þ§", "க்ஷு", $body); $body = str_replace("þ¨", "க்ஷூ", $body); I guess i am missing something as silly as encoding the characters into certain type of strings, do the conversion and then convert to back to UTF8 How best to do this? Sorry if this is a very basic question. Thanks a lot in advance Regards Venkatesh