Zend_Cache And UTF-8 Problem - php

Question

I'm trying to save UTF-8 characters with Zend_Cache (like Ť, š etc) but Zend_Cache is messing them up and saves them as Å, ¾ and other weird characters.
Here is a snippet of my code that saves the data to the cache (the UTF-8 characters are messed up only online, when I try it on my PC on localhost it works ok):
// cache the external data
$data = array('nextRound' => $nextRound,
'nextMatches' => $nextMatches,
'leagueTable' => $leagueTable);
$cache = Zend_Registry::get('cache');
$cache->save($data, 'externalData');
Before I save the cached data, I purify it with HTMLPurifier and do some parsing with DOM, something like this:
// fetch the HTML from external server
$html = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/test.html');
// purify the HTML so we can load it with DOM
include BASE_PATH . '/library/My/htmlpurifier-4.0.0-standalone/HTMLPurifier.standalone.php';
$config = HTMLPurifier_Config::createDefault();
$config->set('HTML.Doctype', 'XHTML 1.0 Strict');
$purifier = new HTMLPurifier($config);
$html = $purifier->purify($html);
$dom = new DOMDocument();
// hack to preserver UTF-8 characters
$dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="UTF-8">' . $html);
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
// some parsing here
Here is how I initialize Zend_Cache in the bootstrap file:
protected function _initCache()
{
$frontend= array('lifetime' => 7200,
'automatic_serialization' => true);
$backend= array('cache_dir' => 'cache');
$this->cache = Zend_Cache::factory('core',
'File',
$frontend,
$backend);
}
Any ideas? It works on localhost (where I have support for the foreign language used in the HTML) but not on the server.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with a FPDF deployment. Here, the html space character &nbsp was being converted into that same Å character that you're getting here. It was fine on my local windows, but did not work in my linux server environment.
Try this:
$str = iconv('UTF-8', 'windows-1252', html_entity_decode($str));