utf8_encode — Converts a string from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
Warning
This function has been
DEPRECATED as of PHP 8.2.0. Relying on this function
is highly discouraged.
Description
#[\Deprecated( since: '8.2', message: 'visit the php.net documentation for various alternatives', )] functionutf8_encode(string$string): string
This function converts the string string from the
ISO-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8.
Note:
This function does not attempt to guess the current encoding of the provided
string, it assumes it is encoded as ISO-8859-1 (also known as "Latin 1")
and converts to UTF-8. Since every sequence of bytes is a valid ISO-8859-1
string, this never results in an error, but will not result in a useful string
if a different encoding was intended.
Many web pages marked as using the ISO-8859-1 character
encoding actually use the similar Windows-1252 encoding,
and web browsers will interpret ISO-8859-1 web pages as
Windows-1252. Windows-1252 features
additional printable characters, such as the Euro sign
(€) and curly quotes (“”), instead of certain ISO-8859-1
control characters. This function will not convert such
Windows-1252 characters correctly. Use a different
function if Windows-1252 conversion is required.
Parameters
string
An ISO-8859-1 string.
Return Values
Returns the UTF-8 translation of string.
Changelog
Version
Description
8.2.0
This function has been deprecated.
7.2.0
This function has been moved from the XML extension to the core of PHP.
In previous versions, it was only available if the XML extension was installed.
Examples
Example #1 Basic example
<?php
// Convert the string 'Zoë' from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
$iso8859_1_string = "\x5A\x6F\xEB";
$utf8_string = utf8_encode($iso8859_1_string);
echo bin2hex($utf8_string), "\n";
?>
The above example will output:
5a6fc3ab
Notes
Note:
Deprecation and alternatives
This function is deprecated as of PHP 8.2.0,
and will be removed in a future version. Existing uses should be checked
and replaced with appropriate alternatives.
Similar functionality can be achieved with mb_convert_encoding(),
which supports ISO-8859-1 and many other character encodings.
<?php
$iso8859_1_string = "\xEB"; // 'ë' (e with diaeresis) in ISO-8859-1
$utf8_string = mb_convert_encoding($iso8859_1_string, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');
echo bin2hex($utf8_string), "\n";
$iso8859_7_string = "\xEB"; // the same string in ISO-8859-7 represents 'λ' (Greek lower-case lambda)
$utf8_string = mb_convert_encoding($iso8859_7_string, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-7');
echo bin2hex($utf8_string), "\n";
$windows_1252_string = "\x80"; // '€' (Euro sign) in Windows-1252, but not in ISO-8859-1
$utf8_string = mb_convert_encoding($windows_1252_string, 'UTF-8', 'Windows-1252');
echo bin2hex($utf8_string), "\n";
?>
utf8_decode
String Functions