Convert foreign characters to HTML with PHP

[donatello]

I am trying to build a function to extract the Facebook ID of a user.

The simple part of my function works fine, but I would like to display the user's name as well - this breaks down when foreign characters are displayed.

You can see the test form here:
http://www.metataggenerator.org/anal...-id-finder.php

This is already populated with a foreign character Facebook ID.

I would like to find some way to globally switch this to HTML, in other words change this:

\u0105

into this:

ą

This would then cover every possible FB language... Spanish, Polish, Greek, Russian...

To go through all of the characters one at a time seems silly - like this:

$description = ereg_replace('\u0142','ł', $description);

[NogDog]

Off hand I don't know an easy way to do this, though you could probably do something with preg_replace_callback(), using a character class that is a range of UTF-8 character codes above decimal 255. But my first thought is, why bother? Why not just serve up the page as UTF-8 and not worry about it?

[donatello]

This works if there were some way to shorten it to a function... say, for X =...

<?php
$idurl = 'http://www.facebook.com/tkliwinihilisci';
$page = file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/$idurl");
$string = $page;

$ent = array(             // Convert Foreign Language Characters to HTML
'\u011'=>'&#x011;',
'\u012'=>'&#x012;',
'\u013'=>'&#x013;',
'\u014'=>'&#x014;',
'\u016'=>'&#x016;',
'\u017'=>'&#x017;',
'\u018'=>'&#x018;',
'\u019'=>'&#x019;',
'\u020'=>' ',
'\u015b'=>'&#x015b;',
'\u0105'=>'&#x0105;',
'\u0106'=>'&#x0106;',
'\u0107'=>'&#x0107;',
'\u0108'=>'&#x0108;',
'\u0109'=>'&#x0109;',
'\u0110'=>'&#x0110;',
'\u0111'=>'&#x0111;',
'\u0112'=>'&#x0112;',
'\u0113'=>'&#x0113;',
'\u0114'=>'&#x0114;',
'\u0115'=>'&#x0115;',
'\u0116'=>'&#x0116;',
'\u0117'=>'&#x0117;',
'\u0118'=>'&#x0118;',
'\u0119'=>'&#x0119;',
'\u0120'=>'&#x0120;',
'\u0121'=>'&#x0121;',
'\u0122'=>'&#x0122;',
'\u0123'=>'&#x0123;',
'\u0124'=>'&#x0124;',
'\u0125'=>'&#x0125;',
'\u0126'=>'&#x0126;',
'\u0127'=>'&#x0127;',
'\u0128'=>'&#x0128;',
'\u0129'=>'&#x0129;',
'\u0439'=>'&#x0439;'
); 
$string = strtr("$string", $ent);
echo $string;
?>