If you have been working with RSS feeds chances are you’ve come across strange characters like “” and struggled to make them go away — we all have.

First you try and preg match them all…. but different ones keep popping up.  And of course by the time you are done you are convinced that all these jerks that put -’s, %,^,*,@,!, and ~ in their posts are just out to get YOU personally.  They are… get over it.

While you deal with that little fact, time to learn a little about the iconv function.  Of course if you actually search for a way to get rid of all those strange characters in your rss feeds you find a lot of crap that isn’t very helpful.  You ‘probably’ need the iconv function to get anywhere with the encoding problems you will experience when you try and scrape and display rss feeds…..

Here is a little example ($rss being the content you are converting):

$rss = iconv(“UTF-8″, “ISO-8859-1″, $rss);

The rest of the docs are on php.net – go read up.