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The man page says &lt;QUOTE&gt;Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8&lt;/QUOTE&gt; so I expect that you would mung the data if you did this. &nbsp;However the user-contributed notes contain a couple of examples on how to detect if a string is UTF-8. &nbsp;You might use those in advance to know what strings to avoid.<br />
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<a href="http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php" rel="ugc">http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php</a><br />
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HTH, ~Ray
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The man page says <QUOTE>Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8</QUOTE> so I expect that you would mung the data if you did this.  However the user-contributed notes contain a couple of examples on how to detect if a string is UTF-8.  You might use those in advance to know what strings to avoid.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php [http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php]

HTH, ~Ray

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What happens if I use utf8_encode() on text that is already in a UTF-8 encoding? &nbsp;If problems could be caused, how could they be avoided?
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What happens if I use utf8_encode() on text that is already in a UTF-8 encoding?  If problems could be caused, how could they be avoided?

using utf8_encode() on text that is already encoded

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