Why am I seeing strange characters like ë, Ã, ì, ù, and à on my website, and how can I fix them?

How to Correctly Decode Strange Characters Displaying as ë, Ã, ì, ù, Ã

If your web page displays incorrect characters such as ë, Ã, ì, ù, and à instead of normal characters, it likely indicates an encoding issue.

Why This Happens

These characters are encoded in UTF-8 format. When the page header and MySQL database are not both set to UTF-8 encoding, the characters are not decoded properly and appear as strange symbols.

How to Convert Them

To convert these strange characters to their intended ISO-8859-1 counterparts, you need to use the utf8_decode() function. This function will convert the UTF-8 encoded characters back to their single-byte ISO-8859-1 equivalents.

Example

Here's an example of how to use utf8_decode():

<code class="php">$encoded_string = "ë, Ã, ì, ù, Ã";
$decoded_string = utf8_decode($encoded_string);
echo $decoded_string; // Outputs correct characters</code>

By using utf8_decode(), you can properly convert UTF-8 encoded characters to their corresponding ISO-8859-1 characters, resolving the issue of strange characters being displayed on your web page.

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