[PHP] Using Chr() on Characters Over 255

[Rob Paxon]

XHTML specifications state that certain literal characters must be 
represented as their entity, as in ", etc.  The function 
htmlentities() only encodes a few of them.  I wrote a function that uses 
an array of all special characters listed in the XHTML specification and 
the html entity code for it with strtr().  It looks a little something 
like this (just a sample):
[...]
$entities[chr(248)] = 'ø';
$entities[chr(249)] = 'ù';
$entities[chr(250)] = 'ú';
$entities[chr(251)] = 'û';
$entities[chr(252)] = 'ü';
$entities[chr(253)] = 'ý';
$entities[chr(254)] = 'þ';
$entities[chr(255)] = 'ÿ';
$entities[chr(338)] = 'Œ';
$entities[chr(339)] = 'œ';
[...]
$str = strtr($str, $entities);

Now, I admit I don't know much about character encodings.  My site is in 
standard ISO as are my scripts.  I know there are only 255 characters in 
the basic ISO set but there are additional sets containing characters 
XHTML needs to be represented by entities.  When testing my function it 
produced utter garbage, replacing some characters, whether they be 
special or normal letters, with various characters from the array.  I 
eventually found that by removing all characters in the array above 255 
the function works fine.  I then assume that the chr() function is 
limited to the basic 255 characters.  When I started writing this though 
I ponder if perhaps the limitation is in strtr().  If the limitation is 
strtr(), which I think less likely, I could easily make due with 
str_replace().  However, if the limitation is in chr() as I suspect, are 
there any possible workarounds or other functions I might look into?

Thanks in advanced.  Sorry for the long-winded message.

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