Based upon that snippet below using preg_match() I needed something faster and less specific.  That function works and is brilliant but it scans the entire strings and checks that it conforms to UTF-8.  I wanted something purely to check if a string contains UTF-8 characters so that I could switch character encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf-8.

I modified the pattern to only look for non-ascii multibyte sequences in the UTF-8 range and also to stop once it finds at least one multibytes string.  This is quite a lot faster.

<?php

function detectUTF8($string)
{
        return preg_match('%(?:
        [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]        # non-overlong 2-byte
        |\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]               # excluding overlongs
        |[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}      # straight 3-byte
        |\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]               # excluding surrogates
        |\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}    # planes 1-3
        |[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}                  # planes 4-15
        |\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}    # plane 16
        )+%xs', $string);
}

?>