Glad this is solved! A great way to think/talk about this issue that helped me understand it is to differentiate between "characters" and "bytes". Then: 
$bytes = encode($characters);
$characters = decode($bytes);

[download]
where "characters" are the conceptual thing to be represented, and "bytes" is the means the computer (and hard disk etc) use to do the representing.

In reply to Re: Yet another Encoding issue... by etj
in thread Yet another Encoding issue... by Bod

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