Im having a problem with removing non-utf8 characters from string, which are not displaying properly. Characters are like this 0x97 0x61 0x6C 0x6F (hex representation)
The text may contain non-utf8 character. Try to do first:
$nonutf8 = mb_convert_encoding($nonutf8 , 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
You can read more about it here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.phpnews