如何在latin1数据库中打印UTF-8数据？

Question

My issue is I have a database which was imported as UTF-8 that has columns that are default latin1. This is obviously an issue so when I set the charset to UTF-8 on php it gives me � instead of the expected ae character.

Now, when I originally had my encoding as windows-1252 it worked perfectly but then when I validate my file it says that windows-1252 is legacy and shouldn't be used.

Obviously I'm only trying to get rid of the error message but the only problem is I'm not allowed to change anything in the database at all. Is there any way the data can be output as utf-8 whilst still being stored as latin1 in the DB?

Answer 1

Time ago, I used this function to resolve printing texts in a hellish page of different lurking out-of-control charsets xD:

function to_entities($string)
{
    $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string, array('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1')); // and a few encodings more... sigh...
    return htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, $encoding, false);          
}

print to_entities('á é í ó ú ñ');