Using non standard characters in associative array - php

Question

Good day all! I am working on a parser for a chat room that can color text based on who was talking for archive purposes. I have it working perfectly, except now the administrator wants to be able to remove the "fancy" names and replace with more readable versions for some of their regular people.
The chat room allows an extended range of letters and symbols to use, that, when transferred to a rtf file, may not exactly transfer fully.
I cant get it to work, and dont see any reason why it should not.
This is an example of what I have:
$nameconvert = array(
"îrúål__Þħōþħ" => "Eriel__Thoth",
);
***Scripting that parses an uploaded text
file line by line, each line places in an
array using space as delimiter... thus
name of person talking is $row_data[0]***
$name = $row_data[0];
$name = $nameconvert[$name];
** Code to throw everything back together **
Now, this is just a simplified snippet, but for whatever reason, it does not work. Now if I did $name = $nameconvert['îrúål__Þħōþħ'] then it does work, telling me that the name im putting in script, and name being pulled from mytext file are two different things, though they are visually identical
HELP!

Answer 1

I have found the answer, and wish to share my solution to others.
This is the modified code
$nameconvert = array(
"0123456789abcdef" => "Eriel__Thoth",
);
***Scripting that parses an uploaded text
file line by line, each line places in an
array using space as delimiter... thus
name of person talking is $row_data[0]***
$name = $row_data[0]
$name = $nameconvert[bin2hex(mb_convert_encoding($name,"UTF-8"))];
$name = $nameconvert[$name];
** Code to throw everything back together **
The command bin2hex(mb_convert_encoding($name,"UTF-8")) takes the name from the file, ensures it is in UTF-8 format, then creates its hexadecimal equivalent. It then uses that in the array to correspond to a easier to read name
It works just the way I am wanting!