Here's another transcribe function. This one converts cp1252 (aka. Windows-1252) into iso-8859-1 (aka. latin1, the default PHP charset). It only transcribes the few exotic characters, which are unique to cp1252.
function transcribe_cp1252_to_latin1($cp1252) {
return strtr(
$cp1252,
array(
"\x80" => "e", "\x81" => " ", "\x82" => "'", "\x83" => 'f',
"\x84" => '"', "\x85" => "...", "\x86" => "+", "\x87" => "#",
"\x88" => "^", "\x89" => "0/00", "\x8A" => "S", "\x8B" => "<",
"\x8C" => "OE", "\x8D" => " ", "\x8E" => "Z", "\x8F" => " ",
"\x90" => " ", "\x91" => "`", "\x92" => "'", "\x93" => '"',
"\x94" => '"', "\x95" => "*", "\x96" => "-", "\x97" => "--",
"\x98" => "~", "\x99" => "(TM)", "\x9A" => "s", "\x9B" => ">",
"\x9C" => "oe", "\x9D" => " ", "\x9E" => "z", "\x9F" => "Y"));
