PHP config/Iconv hack
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<- MediaWiki architecture < PHP config
MediaWiki uses iconv to convert data between character sets. For most configurations, this is done mainly for conversion of URLs to and from UTF-8.
If you can't recompile PHP with iconv support and you only expect to deal with Latin-1 data, you can probably get away with defining this hackish substitute:
function iconv($from,$to,$text) {
if(strcasecmp($from,$to) == 0) return $text;
if(strcasecmp($from,"utf-8") == 0) return utf8_decode($text);
if(strcasecmp($to,"utf-8") == 0) return utf8_encode($text);
return $text;
}