PHP: utf8_encode function - Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8

Description

string utf8_encode ( string $data )

This function encodes the string data to UTF-8, and returns the encoded version. UTF-8 is a standard mechanism used by Unicode for encoding wide character values into a byte stream. UTF-8 is transparent to plain ASCII characters, is self-synchronized (meaning it is possible for a program to figure out where in the bytestream characters start) and can be used with normal string comparison functions for sorting and such. PHP encodes UTF-8 characters in up to four bytes, like this:

**UTF-8 encoding**
bytes	bits	representation
1	7	0bbbbbbb
2	11	110bbbbb 10bbbbbb
3	16	1110bbbb 10bbbbbb 10bbbbbb
4	21	11110bbb 10bbbbbb 10bbbbbb 10bbbbbb

Each b represents a bit that can be used to store character data.

Parameters

data: An ISO-8859-1 string.

Return Values

Returns the UTF-8 translation of data .