Decoding strings on PHP: Data treats UTF-8 Bytes as Windows-1252

Question

I am getting data from a web API which has a strange encoding. I am using PHP and can't seem to decode input strings. I seem to be having this problem, which explains what's going but doesn't really help me figure out how to fix it. Can anyone help? Thanks!

Answer 1

You may want to try analyzing the encoding using something like mb_detect_encoding().

http://www.php.net/mb_detect_encoding

Answer 2

You can use mb_detect_encoding() to detect the encoding of the strings.

If they are not what you are expecting, you can use mb_convert_encoding() to convert to something like UTF-8 or whatever you want.