My PHP script parses a web site and pulls out an HTML DIV that

Question

Asked: June 7, 20262026-06-07T20:02:51+00:00 2026-06-07T20:02:51+00:00

My PHP script parses a web site and pulls out an HTML DIV that looks like this (and saves it as a string)

<div id="merchantinfo">The following merchants: Nautica®, Brookstone®, Teds® ©2012 Blabla</div>

I store this as $merchantList (string).

However, when I output the data to the webpage

echo $merchantList

The encoding gets messed up and displays as:

NauticaÃ‚Â®, BrookstoneÃ‚Â®, TedsÃ‚Â® Â©2012 Blabla

I tried adding the following to the display page:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>

But that didn’t do anything. –Thanks

EDIT:: ————

For the question, the accepted answer is correct.

But I realized my actual issue was slightly different.

The initial parsing using DOMDocument::loadHTML had already mangled the UTF-8 encoding, causing the string to save as

<div id="merchantinfo">The following merchants: NauticaÃ®, BrookstoneÃ®, TedsÃ® ©2012 Blabla</div>

This was solved by:

$html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
$dom->loadHTML($html);

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-06-07T20:02:53+00:00

Editorial Team

Use:

ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');

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