Character Conversion

i have some language files i need to edit, and characters are a problem, specifically converting them to the proper code so they render properly on a web page. is there a program available that i can input a string of characters and get an output of the right code to insert into a page?

 

you can easily do this with PHP

what is the encoding of the characters to begin with?

 

i'm pretty sure its utf-8
these are language files for SMF

 

you should be able to find the PHP string conversion function you need on this page: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php