in reply to Re^3: Encoding problem
in thread Encoding problem

Thank you for the prompt response, Ikegami. A couple of very helpful insights there, which I shall attempt to make use of as soon as possible.

BTW, I am pretty confident that the entire file has been double encoded. I sure hope, anyway, that that is as bad as it gets... :-)

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Re^5: Encoding problem
by ikegami (Patriarch) on May 08, 2009 at 20:08 UTC

    I am pretty confident that the entire file has been double encoded.

    Due to a special relationship between iso-latin-1 and UTF-8, it's not really possible to double-encode. 

    • encode('iso-latin-1', encode('UTF-8', $text))

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      produces the same output as 
      encode('UTF-8', $text)

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    • For the characters where it works, 

      encode('UTF-8', encode('iso-latin-1', $text))

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      produces the same output as 
      encode('UTF-8', $text)

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      For the characters where it doesn't, you'll get a question mark ("?"). 

    • encode('iso-latin-1', encode('iso-latin-1', $text))

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      produces the same output as 
      encode('iso-latin-1', $text)

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    • The only combination where double-encoding is possible when using those encodings is 

      encode('UTF-8', encode('UTF-8', $text))

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