malformed utf 8 characters 2c possibly incorrectly encoded

1/**
2 * Encode array from latin1 to utf8 recursively
3 * @param $dat
4 * @return array|string
5 */
6   public static function convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($dat)
7   {
8      if (is_string($dat)) {
9         return utf8_encode($dat);
10      } elseif (is_array($dat)) {
11         $ret = [];
12         foreach ($dat as $i => $d) $ret[ $i ] = self::convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($d);
13
14         return $ret;
15      } elseif (is_object($dat)) {
16         foreach ($dat as $i => $d) $dat->$i = self::convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($d);
17
18         return $dat;
19      } else {
20         return $dat;
21      }
22   }
23// Sample use
24// Just pass your array or string and the UTF8 encode will be fixed
25$data = convert_from_latin1_to_utf8_recursively($data);