Stripping accents from characters as they pass through a stream and then written to file

Hi folks, As the subject states I am trying to convert accented characters to their ASCII equivalents as they pass through a stream and then get written to file by the called script but am not having any luck. Here is my code: main.php -------------- $descriptors = array( 0 => array("pipe", "r"), 1 => array("pipe", "w") ); // Create connection $process = proc_open("php script.php", $descriptors, $pipes); // Attach filter stream_filter_append($pipes[0], 'convert.iconv.UTF-8/ASCII//TRANSLIT'); fwrite($pipes[0], "é"); ... close stuff, etc ... script.php -------------- $fd = fopen('log.txt', "ab"); // I've tried with and without the binary switch $in = fopen("php://stdin", "r"); while (!feof($in)) { $line = fgets($in); fwrite($fd, $line); } ... close stuff, etc ... And the character in my log file is a question mark (?). The 2 php files are encoded as UTF-8 and according to Notepad++ the log.txt file is encoded in ANSI. Any thoughts? Marc