... 3.0.6 - 3.0.18 only, PHP 4 >= 4.0.0) utf8_encode -- encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8 . string utf8_encode ( string data) . This function encodes the string data to UTF-8 , and returns the encoded version. UTF-8 is a standard mechanism used by Unicode for encoding wide character values into a byte stream. ... PHP encodes UTF-8 characters in up to four bytes, like this: . ... 11110bbb 10bbbbbb 10bbbbbb 10bbbbbb Each b represents a bit that can be used to store character data. ...