How to convert any character encoding to UTF8 on PHP

Question

I\'m working on a web crawler that grabs data from sites all over the world, and is dealing with distinct languages and encodings.

Currently I\'m using the following

Answer 1

You can try utf_encode($str).

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php#89789

Or you can replace the content type meta tag with

from header of crawled content