Option A, please. I have never had a reason to use either of these two functions. I assume there's plenty of valid applications for converting between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, but that function causes more harm than good. I have seen plenty of people use it, but I have never seen anyone use it properly. Most of the time people use it to fix their mojibake text when they forget to set the connection charset in PDO or mysqli. I was a little surprised to learn that these functions had something to do with XML.
The reason why I consider them dangerous is that people using them are most likely solving the wrong problem. The problem isn't the conversion from ISO to UTF but having the text in the wrong format in the first place. They are used as some kind of magical solution that fixes an annoying problem. I would have no quarrel with them if they were named correctly though. Another reason why I do not like these functions is that they let you shoot yourself in the foot very easily. They don't warn about invalid or missing code points, which often leads to more data corruption. When doing the same with ICONV you at least get a notice. I think we really do not need to keep these functions. As for the alternative that we can offer, iconv seems to be doing exactly the same thing and even better. mb_convert_encoding does the same but also silently ignores invalid characters. So we already offer plenty of alternatives. We don't need to add anything new. -- Kamil
