Display Ž from substring
<p>I extract first letter of author with substr function for navigation purposes. The author named Žižek produces akward symbol instead first letter. I ommit this issue hardcoding value if this name occurs. My db/connection is utf8, my html is utf8, my file is utf8.</p>

<pre><code>$letter='';
foreach ($authors as $value) {
    if($letter!=substr($value-&gt;author-&gt;name, 0,1)){
         $letter=substr($value-&gt;author-&gt;name, 0,1);
     if ($value-&gt;author-&gt;name=='Žižek'){
        echo '&lt;a name="'.strtolower($letter).'"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;span class="vbig red"&gt;ž&lt;/span&gt;';
    } else {
         echo '&lt;a name="'.strtolower($letter).'"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;span class="vbig red"&gt;'.$letter.'&lt;/span&gt;';
    }
}
</code></pre>

<p>Can I do better than that ?</p>