Text Encoding

Encoding is the way characters are organized to hold a meaning while being transmitted, stored or manipulated.

Encoding applies to PHP scripts, which should be UTF-8 encoded, although it might support other formats.

Encoding applies to incoming and outgoing data.

Encoding operations are provided with ext/mbstring, ext/iconv and ext/intl extensions.

Encoding is also used for code: the source is encoded when it is transformed in an unreadable yet still executable form.

Encoding is also called a character set.

<?php
$text = 'This is the Euro symbol €.';

echo 'Original : ', $text, PHP_EOL;
echo 'TRANSLIT : ', iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'IGNORE   : ', iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//IGNORE', $text), PHP_EOL;
echo 'Plain    : ', iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $text), PHP_EOL;

?>

Documentation

See also Useful Encoding and decoding Functions You Need to Know and Character Encoding for PHP Developers: Unicode, UTF-8 and ASCII.

Related : Multibyte String, Iconv, Internationalization Functions, Character, HTML Entity