Question

so for example this will turn 1251 into utf-8.

$utf8 = iconv('windows-1251', 'utf-8', $ansi);

But how to turn unknown (when it comes to us we do not know yet what format it is) ( in general any ) format (possibly known by Iconv ) to utf-8? (code sample)

Answer 1

You cannot translate from an unknown character set, the best you can do is make a guess about the actual charset and use that guess as first parameter – you can use mb_detect_encoding() for that purpose.