If you try to use mb_detect_encoding to detect whether a string is valid UTF-8, use the strict mode, it is pretty worthless otherwise.

<?php
    $str = 'áéóú'; // ISO-8859-1
    mb_detect_encoding($str, 'UTF-8'); // 'UTF-8'
    mb_detect_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', true); // false
?>