(PHP 4 >= 4.0.5, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
iconv — Convert a string from one character encoding to another
$from_encoding, string $to_encoding, string $string): string|false
   Converts string from from_encoding
   to to_encoding.
  
from_encoding
       The current encoding used to interpret string.
      
to_encodingThe desired encoding of the result.
       If the string //TRANSLIT is appended to
       to_encoding, then transliteration is activated. This
       means that when a character can't be represented in the target charset,
       it may be approximated through one or several similarly looking
       characters. If the string //IGNORE is appended,
       characters that cannot be represented in the target charset are silently
       discarded. Otherwise, E_NOTICE is generated and the function
       will return false.
      
        If and how //TRANSLIT works exactly depends on the
        system's iconv() implementation (cf. ICONV_IMPL).
        Some implementations are known to ignore //TRANSLIT,
        so the conversion is likely to fail for characters which are illegal for
        the to_encoding.
       
stringThe string to be converted.
   Returns the converted string, or false on failure.
  
Example #1 iconv() example
<?php
$text = "This is the Euro symbol '€'.";
echo 'Original : ', $text, PHP_EOL;
echo 'TRANSLIT : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'IGNORE   : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'Plain    : ', iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $text), PHP_EOL;
?>
The above example will output something similar to:
Original : This is the Euro symbol '€'. TRANSLIT : This is the Euro symbol 'EUR'. IGNORE : This is the Euro symbol ''. Plain : Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string in .\iconv-example.php on line 7
Note:
The character encodings and options available depend on the installed implementation of iconv. If the argument to
from_encodingorto_encodingis not supported on the current system,falsewill be returned.