php non latin to hex function - php

Question

I have website that's in win-1251 encoding and it needs to stay that way. But I also need to be able to echo few links that contain non latin, non cyrillic characters like šžāņūī...
I need a function that convert this
"māja un man tā patīk"
to
"māja un man tā patīk"
and that does not touch html, so if there is <b> it needs to stay as <b>, not > or <
And please no advices about the encoding and how wrong that is.

Answer 1

$str = "<b>Obāchan</b> おばあちゃん";
$str = preg_replace_callback('/./u', function ($matches) {
$chr = $matches[0];
if (strlen($chr) > 1) {
$chr = mb_convert_encoding($chr, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8');
}
return $chr;
}, $str);
This expects the original $str to be UTF-8 encoded, i.e. your PHP file should be saved in UTF-8. It encodes all non-ASCII compatible code points to HTML entities. Since all HTML special characters are ASCII characters, they remain untouched. The resulting string is pure ASCII. Since the lower Win-1251 code points are ASCII compatible, the resulting string is also a valid Win-1251 string. The above $str converts to:
<b>Obāchan</b> おばあちゃん

Answer 2

The main things you probably don't want to encode are <, > and &. Those are really the only special characters. So how about encoding everything first, and then just decode <, > and & I feel you should be fine.
This is untested:
$output =
htmlspecialchars_decode(
htmlentities($input, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'CP-1251')
);
let me know

Answer 3

What Evert suggest looks logical to me too! If you insist this is a way to do it if there are only two letters that bother you. For more letters the scrit will not be as effective and needs to change.
<?PHP
function myConvert($str)
{
$chars['ā']='ā';
$chars['ī']='ī';
foreach ($chars as $key => $value)
$output = str_replace($key, $value, $str);
echo $str;
}
myConvert("māja un man tā patīk");
?>
==================edited==============
For many characters maybe this one can help you:
<?PHP
function myConvert($str)
{
$final=null;
$parts = preg_split("/&#[0-9]*;/i", $str);//get all text parts
preg_match_all("/&#[0-9]*;/i", $str, $delimiters );//get delimiters;
$delimiters[0][]='';//make arrays equal size
foreach($parts as $key => $value)
$final.=$value.mb_convert_encoding
($delimiters[0][$key], "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES");
return $final;
}
$fh = fopen("testFile.txt", 'w') ;
fwrite($fh, myConvert("māja un man tā patīkī"));
fclose($fh);
?>
The desired output is written in the text file. This code, exactly as it is -not merged in some project- does what it claims to do. Converts codes like ā to the analogous character they present.