Unknown characters like †in the string

I'm getting unknown characters when I echo data on web page. testing.doc contains

buy the stock "cheap" before the rest of the market

$data = file_get_contents('testing.doc');

$soap->SetLocalTemplate(
   array(
        'template' => base64_encode($data),
        'format'   => 'doc'
    )
);

$soap->CreateDocum开发者_如何学运维ent();
        $result = $soap->RetrieveDocument(
            array(
                'format' => 'txt'
            )
        );

$data = $result->RetrieveDocumentResult;
file_put_contents(file.txt', base64_decode($data));

If i read the text file file.txt I get the exact text as stored in testing.doc but if I do like this :

echo base64_decode($data);

I get

buy the stock “cheap†before the rest of the market

Now there are some unknown characters. Please tell me how resolve this issue?

---

Looks like a character encoding issue.

If the encoding set your web page is using differs from the source where you're grabbing content from, then you will get funny characters like the above.

---

Your page is probably treated as ISO-8859-1 encoded, but the XML data is in UTF-8.

Either change your output encoding to UTF-8, or use iconv() to convert it to ISO-8859-1.

---

As others have mentioned, XML data has UTF-8 encoding.

For echoing things to a browser, you should set the header, especially when you know the encoding of what you're trying to echo:

header('content-type:text/html;charset=utf8');

This goes right before the call to echo. For example:

/* get content, set it to $content */

header('content-type:text/html;charset=utf8');
echo $content;