I've updated my code a bit on the test page i was working on (also updated within the post above). i need to grab some Zs. 4:30am here on the US west coast.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.phpAs for iconv, I read the php example and noticed their sample was backwards from how we need it, their example of iconv was going from utf8 to iso-8859-1 -- we need to go from iso-8859-1 to utf8.
In our case, we just want to take the $post / $sig strings and convert them to utf8 without black diamonds. And we already know how all the older posts were stored in our database, as "latin1_swedish_ci" / ISO-8869-1.
Also have a quick skim through this obvious solution -- I've also mentioned this option within a URL sanitation thread a few years ago:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.phpAt this point, we just need to take the stored user-generated-content from your database's previous collation and display it on the screen so it looks nice
