表utf8中插入了奇怪的字符

Question

I have a site developed in codeigniter where I'd like to insert a record inside my database in a table with utf8 fields.
The problem is that when I insert something inside the table I see that:

�"�h�t�t�p�:�/�/�I�m�a�g�e�1�.�u�r�l�f�o�r�i�m�a�g�e�s�.�c�o�m�/�D�e�f�a�u�l�t�/�8�8�0�4�/�2�3�6�9�2�2�6�2�-�1�8�4�3�3�8�5�2�6�6�.�j�p�g�"�

There are many more characters. The real string is a simple path. I don't know the format of the string because it is from an external server.

This is my query to insert record. I take the string from xml and if I print it inside the page I see the correct string. The problem occurs whenever I check inside the database:

foreach($img->childNodes as $node){
     $data = array(
         'image'=>$node->getAttribute('path'),
     );
     $this->db->insert('hotel_images',$data);
}

Answer 1

That data is not UTF-8. It is UCS-2 or UTF-16. UCS-2 is a subset of UTF-16, so treating it as UTF-16 should do the trick.

You can convert it using iconv.

$data = iconv("UTF-16", "UTF-8", $data);