- utf8_decode: documentation ( source)
<?php
echo "Cossé";
echo utf8_decode("Cossé");
echo iconv("ASCII","UTF-8//TRANSLIT","Cossé");
$in_utf8encoded = "é à ù è ò Cossé";
// first you need the convert the string to the charset you want...
$in_iso8859encoded = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $in_utf8encoded);
// ...in order to make htmlentities work with the same charset
//$out_iso8859= htmlentities($in_iso8859encoded, ENT_COMPAT, "ISO-8859-1");
// then only to display in your page, revert it back to utf-8
echo iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $in_iso8859encoded);