Decode Unicode strings in PHP

util.php

<?php
#source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2934563/how-to-decode-unicode-escape-sequences-like-u00ed-to-proper-utf-8-encoded-char

function replace_unicode_escape_sequence($match) {
    return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2BE');
}

function unicode_decode($str) {
    return preg_replace_callback('/\\\\u([0-9a-f]{4})/i', 'replace_unicode_escape_sequence', $str);
}

$str = unicode_decode('\u00e9');

?>