Problems with special chars encoding with an access mdb database using php - php

Question

My boss is forcing me to use an access mdb database (yes, I'm serious) in a php server.
I can connect it and retrieve data from it, but as you could imagine, I have problems with encodings because I want to work using utf8.
The thing is that now I have two "solutions" to translate Windows-1252 to UTF-8
This is the first way:
mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252").
It works, but the problem is that special chars are not properly converted, for example char º is converted to \u00ba and char Ó is converted to \u00d3.
My second way is doing this:
mb_convert_encoding(mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252"), "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8")
It works too, but it happens the same, special chars are not correctly converted. Char º is converted to º
Does anybody know how to properly change encoding including special chars?
Or does anybody know how to convert from º and \u00ba to something readable?

Answer 1

I did simple test to convert codepoint to letters
<?php
function codepoint_decode($str) {
return json_decode(sprintf('"%s"', $str));
}
$string_with_codepoint = "Ahed \u00d3\u00ba\u00d3";
// $string_with_codepoint = mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252");
$output = codepoint_decode($string_with_codepoint);
echo $output; // Ahed ÓºÓ
Credit go for this answer

Answer 2

I finally found the solution.
I had the solution from the beginning but I was doing my tests wrong.
My bad.
The right way to do it for me is mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252")
But i was checking the result like this:
$stringUTF8 = mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252");
echo json_encode($stringUTF8);
that's why it was returning unicode chars like \u20ac, if I would have done:
$stringUTF8 = mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", "Windows-1252");
echo $stringUTF8;
I should have seen the solution from the beginning but I was wrong. It was json_encode() what was turning special chars into unicode chars.
Thanks everybody for your help!!