Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

Question

I\'m reading out lots of texts from various RSS feeds and inserting them into my database.

Of course, there are several different character encodings used in the fee

Answer 1

Ÿ is Mojibake for ß. In your database, you may have hex

DF if the column is "latin1",
C39F if the column is utf8 -- OR -- it is latin1, but "double-encoded"
C383C5B8 if double-encoded into a utf8 column

You should not use any encoding/decoding functions in PHP; instead, you should set up the database and the connection to it correctly.

If MySQL is involved, see: Trouble with utf8 characters; what I see is not what I stored