Prevent doubly encoding UTF-8 content when incoming data could be UTF-8, ASCII or another character set

gistfile1.aw

$recTitle               = $record['title'];
$encoding               = mb_detect_encoding( $recTitle, 'UTF-8', true );
if ( empty( $encoding ) ) {
    $recTitle           = mb_convert_encoding( $recTitle, 'UTF-8' );
}

The third parameter of mb_detect_encoding is our trick. Strict specifies whether to use the strict encoding detection or not. By default, it's false hence the trouble when using only mb_detect_encoding( $recTitle, 'UTF-8' );.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-detect-encoding.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php