PHP Class Encoding featuring popular \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toUTF8() function --formerly known as forceUTF8()-- that fixes mixed encoded strings.

If you apply the PHP function utf8_encode() to an already-UTF8 string it will return a garbled UTF8 string.

This class addresses this issue and provides a handy static function called \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toUTF8().

You don't need to know what the encoding of your strings is. It can be Latin1 (iso 8859-1), Windows-1252 or UTF8, or the string can have a mix of them. \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toUTF8() will convert everything to UTF8.

Sometimes you have to deal with services that are unreliable in terms of encoding, possibly mixing UTF8 and Latin1 in the same string.

Update:

I've included another function, \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8(), which will fix the double (or multiple) encoded UTF8 string that looks garbled.

$utf8_string = \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toUTF8($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

$latin1_string = \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toLatin1($utf8_or_latin1_or_mixed_string);

also:

$utf8_string = \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8($garbled_utf8_string);

Examples:

echo \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football\n");
echo \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football\n");
echo \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football\n");
echo \ForceUTF8\Encoding::fixUTF8("Fédération Camerounaise de Football\n");

will output:

Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football
Fédération Camerounaise de Football

Edit your composer.json file to include the following:

{
    "require": {
        "neitanod/forceutf8": "dev-master"
    }
}