[development] Converting UTF8 strings to ASCII in Drupal

[Brian Vuyk]

Hi all.

I am having a bit of a unique problem here, and I am hoping someone can 
help me out.

In short, we are outputting strings from a custom module we wrote to an 
external service that only accepts the ASCII character set. So, I am 
trying to run all the strings through iconv() to convert them.

Here's the weird part. Take the script below:

$string = "Stéphanie,D Hérouville";
$output = iconv("UTF-8", 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);
print $output;

If I run this from the command line, I get the proper output - 
'Stephanie D Herouville'. However, if I run it in my Drupal 
installation, whether as part of a module or from the Devel 'Execute 
PHP' box, I get different output: 'St?phanie D H?rouville'. That is, 
instead of replacing the character with it's expected ASCII counterpart, 
it replaces it with a ?.

Has anyone encountered this, or have any idea why this is happening?

Brian