PHP UTF-16 characters and str_replace
<p>I'd like to translate a date from Russian and then change its format. When I use <code>str_replace('Сентября', 'September', $date);</code> it doesn't work because as the date function later suggests by throwing an error containing <code>\xD1\x81\xD0\xB5\xD0\xBD\xD1\x82\xD1\x8F\xD0\xB1\xD1\x80\xD1\x8F</code></p>

<p>The string isn't in UTF-8, but in UTF-16. How can I convert the string into UTF-8 without using mb_convert_encoding which my host doesn't support? I tried <code>iconv('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', $date);</code> also with LE BE, but neither helped</p>

<p>The error output looks like this </p>

<pre><code>Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (1 сентября 2016 00:00)

DateTime-&gt;__construct('1 \xD1\x81\xD0\xB5\xD0\xBD\xD1\x82\xD1\x8F\xD0\xB1\xD1...', Object(DateTimeZone)) #
</code></pre>