utf 8 – PHP Utf8 Decoding Issue

utf8_decode converts the string from a UTF-8 encoding to ISO-8859-1, a.k.a. “Latin-1”.
The Latin-1 encoding cannot represent the letter “ě”. It’s that simple.
“Decode” is a total misnomer, it does the same as iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $string).

See What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text.

Problem is in your PHP file encoding , save your file in UTF-8 encoding , then even no need to use utf8_decode , if you get these data 'Praha 5, Staré Město,' from database , better change it charset to UTF-8

you don’t need that (@Rajeev :this string is automatically detected as utf-8 encoded :

echo mb_detect_encoding('Praha 5, Staré Město,');

will always return UTF-8.).

You’d rather see :
https://code.google.com/p/dompdf/wiki/CPDFUnicode

I wound up using a home-grown UTF-8 / UTF-16 decoding function (convert to &#number; representations), I haven’t found any pattern to why UTF-8 isn’t detected, I suspect it’s because the “encoded-as” sequence isn’t always exactly in the same position in the string returned. You might do some additional checking on that.

Three-character UTF-8 indicator: $startutf8 = chr(0xEF).chr(187).chr(191); (if you see this ANYWHERE, not just first three characters, the string is UTF-8 encoded)

Decode according to UTF-8 rules; this replaced an earlier version which chugged through byte by byte:using

function charset_decode_utf_8 ($string) {
/* Only do the slow convert if there are 8-bit characters */
/* avoid using 0xA0 (0) in ereg ranges. RH73 does not like that */
if (! ereg("[0-7]", $string) and ! ereg("[1-7]", $string))
    return $string;

// decode three byte unicode characters
$string = preg_replace("/([0-7])([0-7])([0-7])/e",       
"'&#'.((ord('\1')-224)*4096 + (ord('\2')-128)*64 + (ord('\3')-128)).';'",   
$string);

// decode two byte unicode characters
$string = preg_replace("/([0-7])([0-7])/e",
"'&#'.((ord('\1')-192)*64+(ord('\2')-128)).';'",
$string);

return $string;
}