encode or decode string from mysql using php

Question

In my db I have a field value looking like this:

ΜΑΚΑΡΙΟΥ Γ\'

I think it must be Greek chars inserted when I didn't have set UTF-8 for my db (I think I was using the default Latin 1).

Is there a way to get the actual characters?

Thank you

Answer 1

Not sure, Try this :

$str = "ΜΑΚΑΡΙΟΥ Γ\'";
$val = iconv(mb_detect_encoding($str), "UTF-8", $str);
echo $val;

Answer 2

Try saving the data into a text file and opening the text file in a hex editor (there are a bunch of good free ones). That could show you the underlying code values of the letters, which you could then match against published encodings.

For example, this page lists Unicode values for Polytonic Greek values (not sure you were using Polytonic, though): http://leb.net/reader/text/standards/unicode/old/MappingTables/NewTables/Polytonic_Greek.txt.

Looking at the text with a hex editor will help you to get code values to look up in lookup tables like this.