PHP converting hyphen to three dots when doing curl - php

Question

I am trying to call a .net webservice using Curl from PHP.
Everytime I try to do it, I get an error with the encoding. It says that utf...8 is not supported. When I check tcpdump (PacketPeeper), I see that for some reason curl is converting the string "utf-8" to "utf...8". Actually, it is converting all "-"s to "..."s.
Any idea why?
$req = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf‐8\"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema‐instance\"
xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\"
xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\">
<soap:Body>
<GenerateLink>
..............
</GenerateLink>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>";
$soap_do = curl_init();
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.myurl.com/serv.asmx" );
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_POST, true );
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $req);
curl_setopt($soap_do, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: text/xml; charset: utf-8' ,'SOAPAction: "http://www.myurl.com/serv.asmx"', 'Content-Length: '.strlen($req) ));
$response = curl_exec($soap_do);

Answer 1

I had this when I copy-pasted code among applications, and while pasting (usually with Office application) hyphens got changed into non-breaking-hyphens or such characters that are hard to tell apart from a simple hyphen. I used a hex editor to look at the file where the string (part) was stored that would be given to CURL. You should check ord($req{33})==45 before exploding while debugging! (Check me on the index 33, it was just a fast count!)