Removing Accents from cURL'd page - php

Question

I have a simple function that uses cURL to grab a page and pull out the first and surname:
$base_url = 'http://www.behindthename.com/random/random.php';
$query = http_build_query($params);
$url = $base_url . '?' . $query;
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
A sample $params array could look like this:
Array (
[number] => 1
[gender] => f
[surname] =>
[randomsurname] => yes
[all] => no
[usage_lth] => 1
)
Some of the names that come back have accents in them (which is fine, and I would like that to happen). However, I need to remove the accents when I am doing certain things with the names.
I have tried using Wordpress's remove_accents function, but it never seems to get passed the first !preg_match conditional. The conditional always evaluates to true and the original string just gets returned.
However, if I copy paste a name with accents in it, hard code it, and then run remove_accents on it, everything works. For example:
$name = 'Þýri';
echo remove_accents($name);
Returns 'THyri'.
I don't really understand, since as far as I can tell, the result from curl_exec is utf8, which should work fine.
I have tried calling remove_accents directly on the result returned by cURL (to make sure that my method of pulling out the names wasn't messing anything up), and that doesn't work either - the accents remain.
I have also tried removing the !preg_match conditional, in this case, seems_utf8 comes back true, but still the accents don't get removed.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think you could give a try to htmlentities, the function will convert name with accents to their respective html code you can read documentation here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
Using this function will covert for example:
$string = 'noè';
echo htmlentities($string);
This will output:
noè
Wich will be read by html as
noè
Otherwise if you just need to replace accent with normal letter you can use str_replace function wich will look for a given value and change it with a target value, here an example:
echo str_replace('è', 'e', $string);
Will output
noe
In this case you will have to manually insert all accents you want to replace.
UPDATED
in your case you already have html code for your accent so you can either decode them and then exchange with normal letters or store them with accents (wich is possible, depends on your db codification (UTF-8) should allow you to store them