Convert ascii foreign language letters to their equivalent in PHP?

I have a lot of text with ascii codes embedded, representing german, spanish or french letters occurring in English words, such as the danish O with a slash through it etc.

Is there a way to convert these into alphanumeric equivalents in PHP?

The codes in the files aren't numeric, they are for instance ASCII clusters of backwards E's and 1/4 signs etc.

A spanish name Like Elizabeth Pena, with the accent on the N has like three strange ASCII characters in 开发者_Python百科its place.

This seems more to be Unicode and you are trying to show it as ASCII code. I'd suggest to try a run with htmlentities or utf8_decode

EDIT:

A little trick: Write this statement at the beginning of your website and you're signs should be shown propperly:

header("content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");