How can I convert HTML character references (ף) to regular UTF-8?

Question

I have some hebrew websites that contains character references like: נוף

I can only view these letters if I save the file

Answer 1

Those are XML Character References. You want to decode them using html_entity_decode():

$string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

For more information, you can search Google for the entity in question. See these few examples:

1. Hebrew Characters
2. HTML Entities for Hebrew Characters
3. UTF-8 Encoding Table with HTML entities