I am working on a CodeIgniter project that has information stored in the database with extended ascii characters (128-255) and UTF-8 encoding. As most of you know, CodeIgniter is fairly strict on what is allowed in a url (they only allow what SHOULD be permitted per RFC 1738 ;)). Furthermore sunce you can create basically any character by allowing a percent sign (%) in the URL, alowing that was not a viable option for me.

For instance you cannot use “ñ” (n with a tilde) in the URL parameters. Replacing it with “n” for the database query will however return a valid match. Problem solved! I can just use Normalizer or iconv, right?

Unfortunately I do not have access to Normalizer::normalize or iconv on the server in question, so I had to write my own function for the conversion. I HATE hard coding function arguments, but in this case it was required since storing key/value pairs in the database would have been overkill. So here is my function…

function _normalize($str) {
	$table = array(
		chr(128) => 'EUR',	chr(129) => ' ',	chr(130) => ',',	chr(131) => 'f',	chr(132) => '"',
		chr(133) => '...',	chr(134) => 't',	chr(135) => 'tt',	chr(136) => '^',	chr(137) => '0/00',
		chr(138) => 'S',	chr(138) => '<',	chr(140) => 'OE',	chr(141) => ' ',	chr(142) => 'Z',
		chr(143) => ' ',	chr(144) => ' ',	chr(145) => '\'',	chr(146) => '\'',	chr(147) => '"',
		chr(148) => '"',	chr(149) => '*',	chr(150) => '-',	chr(151) => '-',	chr(152) => '~',
		chr(153) => 'TM',	chr(154) => 's',	chr(155) => '>',	chr(156) => 'oe',	chr(157) => ' ',
		chr(158) => 'z',	chr(159) => 'Y',	chr(160) => ' ',	chr(161) => '!',	chr(162) => 'c',
		chr(163) => '#',	chr(164) => '$',	chr(165) => 'Y',	chr(166) => '|',	chr(167) => 'S',
		chr(168) => '..',	chr(169) => '(c)',	chr(170) => 'a',	chr(171) => '<<',	chr(172) => '<>',
		chr(173) => ' ',	chr(174) => '(r)',	chr(175) => '_',	chr(176) => '',		chr(177) => '+/-',
		chr(178) => '(2)',	chr(179) => '(3)',	chr(180) => '`',	chr(181) => 'u',	chr(182) => 'P',
		chr(183) => '*',	chr(184) => ',',	chr(185) => '(1)',	chr(186) => '',		chr(187) => '>>',
		chr(188) => '1/4',	chr(189) => '1/2',	chr(190) => '3/4',	chr(191) => '?',	chr(192) => 'A',
		chr(193) => 'A',	chr(194) => 'A',	chr(195) => 'A',	chr(196) => 'A',	chr(197) => 'A',
		chr(198) => 'AE',	chr(199) => 'C',	chr(200) => 'E',	chr(201) => 'E',	chr(202) => 'E',
		chr(203) => 'E',	chr(204) => 'I',	chr(205) => 'I',	chr(206) => 'I',	chr(207) => 'I',
		chr(208) => 'D',	chr(209) => 'N',	chr(210) => 'O',	chr(211) => 'O',	chr(212) => 'O',
		chr(213) => 'O',	chr(214) => 'O',	chr(215) => 'x',	chr(216) => 'O',	chr(217) => 'U',
		chr(218) => 'U',	chr(219) => 'U',	chr(220) => 'U',	chr(221) => 'Y',	chr(222) => 'B',
		chr(223) => 'S',	chr(224) => 'a',	chr(225) => 'a',	chr(226) => 'a',	chr(227) => 'a',
		chr(228) => 'a',	chr(229) => 'a',	chr(230) => 'ae',	chr(231) => 'c',	chr(232) => 'e',
		chr(233) => 'e',	chr(234) => 'e',	chr(235) => 'e',	chr(236) => 'i',	chr(237) => 'i',
		chr(238) => 'i',	chr(239) => 'i',	chr(240) => 'o',	chr(241) => 'n',	chr(242) => 'o',
		chr(243) => 'o',	chr(244) => 'o',	chr(245) => 'o',	chr(246) => 'o',	chr(247) => '/',
		chr(248) => 'o',	chr(249) => 'u',	chr(250) => 'u',	chr(251) => 'u',	chr(252) => 'u',
		chr(253) => 'y',	chr(254) => 'b',	chr(255) => 'y'
	);
	return strtr(utf8_decode($str), $table);
}

Hope this is what you were looking for.