I often need to convert multi language text sent to me for use in websites and other apps into UTF8 encoded so I can insert it into source code and databases.
I knocked up a small web page with its charset set to UTF8 then set it up so I can paste from the original doc (eg word or excel) and have the page return the UTF8 encoded version.
Of course the browser will convert the unicode to UTF8 for you as part of the submit (I use IE5 or better for this) then all you have to do in the PHP is encode the UTF8 so the browser will show it in its raw form.
Its a bit bulky but I just convert ALL character to html numbered entities (brute force and ignorance does it again.)
I've used this to encode everything from Hebrew to Japanese without problems
<?
header("Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");
$code = (get_magic_quotes_gpc())?stripslashes($GLOBALS[code]):$GLOBALS[code];
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>UTF8 ENCODER PAGE</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<form method=post action="?seed=<?=time()?>">
Original Unicode<br />
<textarea name="code" cols="80" rows="10"><?=$code?></textarea><br />
Encoded UTF8<br />
<textarea name="encd" cols="80" rows="10"><?
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($code); $i++) {
echo '&#'.ord(substr($code,$i,1));
}
?></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" value="encode">
</form>
</body>
</html>
