correct character decoding

Hi there, I am trying to find a solution for decoding the same string from 2 different character sets (UTF-8, Latin-1) Looks like in the case of latin-1 I need to add utf8_encode before to get the same results. Here is an example // utf-8 $input = urldecode('%20%C3%9Cbersetzung%20franz'); $output = trim(($input)); $output2 = urlencode($output); echo $input.'<br>'.$output.'<br>'.$output2; echo '<a href="'.$output2.'">output 2</a>'; echo '<hr>'; // latin 1 $input = urldecode('%DCbersetzung+franz'); $out = trim(utf8_encode($input)); $out2 = urlencode($out); echo $input.'<br>'.$out.'<br>'.$out2; echo '<a href="'.$out2.'">output 2</a>'; The latin-1 seems to need the utf8-encode to get the same result. Has anybody an idea on how to solve this? I need a function that works for latin-1 and UTF-8. Thank you in advance for any help, Merlin