UTF-8 and HTML entities

Question

I try to eject text from Word.DOC file with PHP. All seems ok, but the only trouble is something like

СУДОВА БУХГАЛТЕРІЯ

instead of russian text. I've tried to use html_entity_decode and utf8_encode, but they didn't help. Is there any simple solution?

Answer 1

html_entity_decode should work with the proper parameters (unless you're using PHP 5.3.3 or later):

html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')

This will convert the character references into UTF-8. Before PHP 5.3.3, the charset parameter's default value was ISO-8859-1 . In that case the cyrillic characters can't be converted as the ISO 8859-1 character set doesn't contain them.