PHP Utf8 Decoding Issue

Question

I have the following address line: Praha 5, Staré Město,

I need to use utf8_decode() function on this string before I can write it to a PDF file (us

Answer 1

utf8_decode converts the string from a UTF-8 encoding to ISO-8859-1, a.k.a. "Latin-1".
The Latin-1 encoding cannot represent the letter "ě". It's that simple.
"Decode" is a total misnomer, it does the same as iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $string).

See What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text.