UTF-8 Character encoding trouble - php

Question

I'm trying to implement this function to handle clean url's for my page: http://cubiq.org/the-perfect-php-clean-url-generator
It works fine for any character when I use it like this:
echo toAscii('åäö');
But as soon as I test it from an input (again with "åäö") form like this:
if (isset($_POST['test'])) {
$test = $_POST['test'];
}
echo toAscii($test);
I get the following error: Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an illegal character in input string in C:\xampp\htdocs\web\bsCMS\ysmt\testurl.php on line 12
This is the complete function toAscii:
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function toAscii($str, $replace=array(), $delimiter='-') {
if( !empty($replace) ) {
$str = str_replace((array)$replace, ' ', $str);
}
$clean = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str);
$clean = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\/_|+ -]/", '', $clean);
$clean = strtolower(trim($clean, '-'));
$clean = preg_replace("/[\/_|+ -]+/", $delimiter, $clean);
return $clean;
}
My guess is I have to sync the character encoding from the form to the toAscii function but how?

Answer 1

Check if this works:
In the HTML, where the form resides, use:
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
To set as a default character encoding to UTF8. That will make the browser set UTF8 and send the variables in POST in UTF8.
Then in your PHP, use the:
header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
To set the HTTP communication to UTF8.