Read ansi file and convert to UTF-8 string

$tmp = iconv('YOUR CURRENT CHARSET', 'UTF-8', $string);

or

$tmp = utf8_encode($string);

Strange thing is you end up with an empty string in your DB. I can understand you'll end up with some garbarge in your DB but nothing at all (empty string) is strange.

I just typed this in my console:

iconv -l | grep -i ansi

It showed me:

ANSI_X3.4-1968
ANSI_X3.4-1986
ANSI_X3.4
ANSI_X3.110-1983
ANSI_X3.110
MS-ANSI

These are possible values for YOUR CURRENT CHARSET As pointed out before when your input string contains chars that are allowed in UTF, you dont need to convert anything.

Change UTF-8 in UTF-8//TRANSLIT when you dont want to omit chars but replace them with a look-a-like (when they are not in the UTF-8 set)

"ANSI" is not really a charset. It's a short way of saying "whatever charset is the default in the computer that creates the data". So you have a double task:

1. Find out what's the charset data is using.
2. Use an appropriate function to convert into UTF-8.

For #2, I'm normally happy with iconv() but utf8_encode() can also do the job if source data happens to use ISO-8859-1.

Update

It looks like you don't know what charset your data is using. In some cases, you can figure it out if you know the country and language of the user (e.g., Spain/Spanish) through the default encoding used by Microsoft Windows in such territory.

Be careful, using iconv() can return false if the conversion fails.

I am also having a somewhat similar problem, some characters from the Chinese alphabet are mistaken for \n if the file is encoded in UNICODE, but not if it is UFT-8.

To get back to your problem, make sure the encoding of your file is the same with the one of your database. Also using utf-8_encode() on an already utf-8 text can have unpleasant results. Try using mb_detect_encoding() to see the encoding of the file, but unfortunately this way doesn't always work. There is no easy fix for character encoding from what i can see :(