Question

This doesn’t work (just echoes “U4e9c”):

echo mb_convert_encoding("U4e9c","UTF-8","auto");

I guess some sort of casting “U4e9c” is needed, but can’t figure out how…

Answer 1

This seems to work fine:

echo "&#" . hexdec(str_replace("U","","U4e9c")) . ";";

Update

Here is where the mb_convert_encoding comes in:

$k = "&#" . hexdec(preg_replace("/[Uu]/","","U4e9c")) . ";";
$k=mb_convert_encoding($k ,"UTF-8","HTML-ENTITIES");

This allows me to UPDATE my mysql DATABASE with $k, (whereas without mb_convert_encoding it only works for DISPLAYING inside an HTML page).