note 90330 added to function.iconv

Like many other people, I have encountered massive problems when using iconv() to convert between encodings (from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15 in my case), especially on large strings. The main problem here is that when your string contains illegal UTF-8 characters, there is no really straight forward way to handle those. iconv() simply (and silently!) terminates the string when encountering the problematic characters (also if using //IGNORE), returning a clipped string. The <?php $newstring = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($oldstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15'); ?> workaround suggested here and elsewhere will also break when encountering illegal characters, at least dropping a useful note ("htmlentities(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in...") I have found a lot of hints, suggestions and alternative methods (it's scary and in my opinion no good sign how many ways PHP natively provides to convert the encoding of strings), but none of them really worked, except for this one: <?php $newstring = mb_convert_encoding($oldstring, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8'); ?> ---- Server IP: 212.124.37.9 Probable Submitter: 195.167.217.249 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/90330 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/90330 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/90330 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php