How do I get PHP to accept ISO-8859-1 characters in general?

This has been bugging me for ages and I want to get to the bottom of this once and for all. I have an associative array which fields I have defined using ISO-8859-1 characters. For instance:

array("utført" => "red");

I also have another array that I have loaded in from a file. I have printed this array out in a b开发者_运维百科rowser, checking that values like Æ, Ø and Å is intact. I try to compare two fields from these arrays and I'm slapped by the message:

Undefined index: utfã¸rt on line 39

I can't help but sob. Every single damn time I involve any letters outside UTF-8 in a script they are at some point converted into ã¸r or similar nonsense.

My script file is encoded in ISO-8859-1, the document from which I'm loading my data is the same, and so is the MySQL table I'm trying to save the data to.

So the only conclusion I can draw is that PHP isn't accepting just any character-sets into it's code, and I have to somehow force PHP to speak Norwegian.

Thanks for any suggestions

Just FYI, I won't accept any answers in the lines of "Just don't use those characters" or "Just replace those characters with UTF equivalents at file load" or any other hack solutions

When you read your data from external file try to convert them in proper encoding.

Something like this I have on my mind...

  $f = file_get_contents('externaldata.txt');
  $f = mb_convert_encoding($f, 'iso-8859-1');
  // from this point deal with $f whatever you want

Also, look at mb_convert_encoding() manual for more info.