Encode any character to numbers/Latin and decode it back

I have a UTF8 string that contains non-English symbols. I 开发者_JS百科need to convert them to Latin/numbers and then get them back.

I tried htmlentities('字')

The result is å­�, but I need something like x3445 so I can use html_entity_decode() or something similar that will return the original character.

How can I do this with PHP?

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Unfortunately, htmlentities will only encode characters that have a named entity. To convert everything else to a numeric entity, you can use mb_encode_numericentities. For example,

$string = mb_encode_numericentity(htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), array (0x80, 0xffff, 0, 0xffff), 'UTF-8');

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The third parameter of the htmlentities function allows you to set the charset that you would like to use for the conversion. See http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php