utf8_decode

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

utf8_decode — Converts a string with ISO-8859-1 characters encoded with UTF-8 to single-byte ISO-8859-1

Description

utf8_decode(string $string): string

This function converts the string string from the UTF-8 encoding to ISO-8859-1. Bytes in the string which are not valid UTF-8, and UTF-8 characters which do not exist in ISO-8859-1 (that is, characters above U+00FF) are replaced with ?.

Note:

Many web pages marked as using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding actually use the similar Windows-1252 encoding, and web browsers will interpret ISO-8859-1 web pages as Windows-1252. Windows-1252 features additional printable characters, such as the Euro sign (€) and curly quotes (“ ”), instead of certain ISO-8859-1 control characters. This function will not convert such Windows-1252 characters correctly. Use a different function if Windows-1252 conversion is required.

Parameters

string

A UTF-8 encoded string.

Return Values

Returns the ISO-8859-1 translation of string.

Changelog

Version Description
7.2.0 This function has been moved to the core of PHP, and therefore lifting the requirement on the XML extension for this function to be available.

See Also

  • utf8_encode() - Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8 - Performs the reverse conversion
  • mb_convert_encoding() - Convert character encoding - Converts between various character encodings, including UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252
  • iconv() - Convert string to requested character encoding - Converts between various character encodings
  • recode_string() - Recode a string according to a recode request - Converts between various character encodings