How to fix encoding with dom - php

Question

I am trying to scrape some old pages and present them in a modern design for me using Dom
And I have a problem with the encoding, The content is in french
I am using this code to get the content that I want, There is 2 type of content "Categories" And "Data"
$html = new DOMDocument();
$html->validateOnParse = true;
#$html->loadHTML($page);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($html);
$table =$xpath->query("//*[#style='background: white']")->item(0);
Then I process the content , First I enter the Categories in a function that convert them to id for me
function category_to_id($category) {
$categories = array('Forêts','Assurance','Aéronautique','Equipement ','Autre');
foreach ($categories as $id => $cat) {
if(trim($cat) == trim($category)) {
return $id + 1;
}
}
}
Then I store everything in MYSQL database
My first problem is my function work only for categories without spécial charachters like Assurance
And the second is that when I go to the database, I find the data stored like this Travaux d'électricité instead of Travaux d'électricité
I tried adding $html->encoding = 'utf-8'; But that didn't change anything
What am i doing wrong, And how can I fix it

Answer 1

Dom doesn't use UTF-8 as default, so you should encode the page to it
$xml->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($page, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8"););
Alternatively, you could utf8_decode your string
echo category_to_id(utf8_decode("Travaux d'électricité"));