Thanks for the tip! htmlentities() didn't work, as it just converted the "&" in the string to "&". However, following the trail I did get it working the other way round, using: html_entity_decode($row['text'], ENT_NOQUOTES, "UTF-8") After this call, I had a real unicode text in my output file. About the question where I saw it - both in phpMyAdmin and in my own PHP script. It seems to be really stored as an ASCII text in the DB, as a substr($row['text'], 0, 1) also simply outputs "&". Thanks for your help, Andreas Minuk Choi schrieb: > Have you tried feeding that through htmlentities()? > > e.g. echo htmlentities("Га"); > > see if that outputs what you want on the page. > > -Mk > > > Andreas Jakl wrote: > >> I've been searching for quite some time now and tried several functions, >> but didn't find a solution. I hope somebody can point me in the right >> direction. >> >> The problem: >> >> Russian text is entered through a web form. It's a rather badly >> administrated external webserver with old versions of everything, so I >> can not set the table to UTF-8. In the MySQL-Table the text gets >> converted to something like "Га" as an ASCII text. >> >> Using PHP I need to get the text out into a plain text file, as a real >> UTF-8 string. >> >> How can I convert this? All the conversion methods from PHP that I tried >> failed, as the text seems to really consist of the individual ASCII >> chars like "&", "#". Therefore, a normal to-unicode-conversion doesn't >> change anything. >> >> Thanks in advance, >> Andreas Jakl >> >> >> -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php