cURL and string problems

[criticalsystems]

I have written a PHP script that logs into  a site and retrieves a file with cURL. The trouble is that when I try to add the string to other text it has it seems extra charactes there. an example is "textbox16戼㹲琀攀砀琀戀漀砀㄀㠀㰀牢>textbox204戼㹲琀攀砀琀戀漀砀㈀㄀". I am quite sure that the caracter encoding is different for some reason but I am unsure of how to fix it.

[framework]

try converting to UTF8 using this code.... $c is the curl output html codes.

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preg_match( '@<meta\s+http-equiv="Content-Type"\s+content="([\w/]+)(;\s+charset=([^\s"]+))?@i', $c, $matches );
$encoding = $matches[3];

$utf8_content = iconv($encoding, "utf-8", $c );
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