How to detect malformed utf-8 string in PHP?

Question

iconv function sometimes gives me an error:

Notice:
iconv() [function.iconv]:
Detected an incomplete multibyte character in input string in [...]
         


        

Answer 1

You could try using mb_detect_encoding to detect if you've got a different character set (than UTF-8) then mb_convert_encoding to convert to UTF-8 if required. It's more likely that people are giving you valid content in a different character set than giving you invalid UTF-8.