Given this:

=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCPi5AbhsoQg==?=

(note that that's exactly what I have, there's no < ASCII 32 chars in there)

In PHP, how do I convert it (and other such ISO-2022-JP strings) to
something more useful? (i.e. UTF-8 or, preferably, Unicode character
entities)

I have iconv installed, and if it's the right command to use, I must
be doing something wrong, because I can only get it to spit out
exactly what I put in.

just my two cents...

http://si.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php
http://si.php.net:8888/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php

/* Convert ISO-2022-JP to UTF-8 */
$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-8", "ISO-2022-JP");

Good luck !

alexander,

You can convert a string from ISO-2022-JP to Unicode using the iconv()
function, like so:

$output_sting = iconv("ISO-2022-JP", "UTF-8", $input_string);

But your string looks like it's also encoded with base64. You can
decode it using the base64_decode() function. (I think it takes a
string without the leading "=?iso-2022-jp?B?" as a parameter, just
"GyRCPi5AbhsoQg==?=" in this case, you'd have to test it.)

Here is the documentation for those two functions:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base64-decode.php

Spot-on, vladimir. Thank you.

If I have my Base64 knowledge right, the actual encoded data is
"GyRCPi5AbhsoQg==" (4-byte chunks with = as a pad), but base64_decode
seems to just ignore any extra junk, so it also works just as you've
written it.

Good luck in becoming a researcher, if that's your goal. You've got my
vote. :)