Question

I have an automatically-generated XML file that is supposed to be encoded with UTF-8. For the most part, the encoding is correct. However, there are some few characters that are not encoded properly. When viewing the file in Emacs, I get \370, \351.

Is there a way to detect their characters programatically? I prefer solutions using PHP, but solutions in Perl or Java would be very helpful as well.

Answer 1

You can check for UTF-8-ness of a string with this regular expression:

(^(?:
[\x00-\x7f] |
[\xc0-\xdf][\x80-\xff] |
[\xe0-\xef][\x80-\xff]{2} |
[\xf0-\xf7][\x80-\xff]{3}
)*$)x