When XML files are read from RSS feeds or from other sources, it is necessary that they both use the same standard encoding. When there is a conflict, strange characters like ‘, ’ gets shown on the browsers.
In RSS feeds, UTF-8 is the standard encoding scheme that is used and if a browser using ISO-8859-1 tries to read and display the data from the feed then these characters get passed on to the display.
To avoid having this strange characters displyed on screen (where ISO-8859-1 encoding is used), PHP’s iconv function comes in handy and you can use it like
echo iconv(“UTF-8″,”ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT”, $temp_item[‘encoded’]);
and this will remove those characters and replace it with the nearest possible character during its tranliteration.
