have a rating system that won't work because of encoding issues

[co.ador]

still the rating system is not rating the items which have encoding charaters the only step i am missing now is to replace the utf8- string function for the normal ones. which is step four from boen suggestions.

 

I hope it can be fixed these issue

 

the string functions below are the one used by the rating system most of the time. what would be the substitution ones in utf-8 string functions for the normal ones below?

 

 if ($varItem != null && strlen(trim($varItem))  != 0)
        {
          // Check if Magic QUotes is ON
          if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc())
          {
            $varItem = addslashes($varItem);
          }
          

 

I had to put back the other type of encoding

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

If I put utf-8 then the rating won't refresh a similar problem I had before but caused by a / at the end of the rating php file, this time comes back again if I don't put the meta tags with ISO-8859-1 encoding. The database still in utf-8 there is obvious a mixture here between the encoding of the webpages and the database encoding but I can't change the header encoding because it will throw out the rating system and won't display the encoding character in the browser from the database. a very complicated case help please