Hi, I have been trying for the last couple of hours to determine the encoding of a text file (.txt in windowz). I have this code: $contents = file_get_contents($config[' txt_dir'] . $file); $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($contents, "UTF-8,ISO-8859-1,WINDOWS-1252"); //,Windows-1255 echo "||encoding:".$encoding."||"; if ($encoding == 'UTF-8') { $utfcontents = $contents; } else if ($encoding == 'ISO-8859-1') { $utfcontents = utf8_encode($contents); } var_dump($utfcontents); The $encoding is ISO-8859-1, the text file contains Hebrew characters, then I'm converting it to utf8. The above code is outputing gibbrish, it seems that it has converted it in some way but not in the proper way that it should have converted it. My page is UTF-8 encoded, without BOM, I send UTF-8 headers to the browser and HTML content encoding meta tag as well. I have no idea what I am doing wrong. I would highly appreciate it if someone could point me to the right direction. Thanks in Advance, Nitsan