I was working on some code that would build an XML list of books. I noticed that the plugin that parsed the XML wasn’t printing the title. While debugging the issue I found it was because the book title had the ° sign in the title. This was causing the XML parser to error out and skip the rest of the title. I had to use the iconv() to account for the special characters in the title. When I used the //TRANSLIT switch I only ended up with 180, which is still better than a blank title. So I tried the //IGNORE switch and that just dropped the ° sign and gave the rest of the title.