struggling with special characters (html_entity_decode, iconv, and more)

Answer 1

1. Save your PHP files as UTF-8.
2. Upon connection do SET NAMES 'UTF8';

If you still need to replace characters do the following:

$string = preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'));

EDIT:

$string = html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')), ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');