utf8_decode() not working, conflicts with urlencode()

Hi there, I am having some trouble with utf8_decode(). Somehow the function returns output=input e.g.: $input = '%20%C3%9Cbersetzung%20franz'; $output = utf8_decode($input); echo $input.'<br>'.$output; My goal is to decode the utf8, trim the input and encode with urlencode(); This is the string which I would like to get: %C3%9Cbersetzung+franz Trim does not work and if I place urlencode() directly on the input it will encode the % sign to %25 and produce therfore a mixture of encodings. Thank you for any help on that! Merlin