Lately I’ve been working with a friend on a daily-deal aggregator. The Groupon-like sites are popping up everywhere and the market for aggregators is still fairly unfilled. My project, Alladeals, target the Swedish daily deals market and as such it needs to support Swedish characters. In future it might have to support other languages as well so I decided that UTF8 was the way to go. Since most webpages are encoded in UTF-8 these days it has been fairly painless to actually work with UTF-8 in PHP, that is, until yesterday.