 <p>Could be some sort of <code>utf8_encode()</code> problem. <a href="http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php#103126" rel="nofollow">This comment</a> on the documentation page seems to indicate if you encode an Umlaut when it's already encoded, it could cause issues.</p> <p>Maybe test to see if the data is already utf-8 encoded with <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-detect-encoding.php" rel="nofollow"><code>mb_detect_encoding()</code></a>. </p>