title: write UTF-8 characters as Ascii into a file
body: <p>I'm trying to convert Hebrew characters from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-8-1 in order to save them into a file.
  I have read about ten posts here , in this site,
  no matter what I do, I always get question marks (???????) instead of hebrew letters.
  I tried <code>iconv()</code>, <code>mb_convert_encoding()</code>, <code>utf8_decode()</code>, all of them convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-8-1 but I keep getting '?????????' in the file.</p>
  
  <pre><code>mb_convert_encoding($fullRecord, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');
  iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $fullRecord);
  iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $fullRecord);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Even this post didn't help because the solution there is in javascript:
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4352209/conversion-from-utf8-to-ascii">Conversion from UTF8 to ASCII</a>
  I wish it could be in php...</p>
  
  <p>I know that there are no hebrew characters in ASCII, but i have an example file that shows it can be done. when I open the file in notepad , it shows hebrew ok and the file is ANSI , so I guess it can be done somehow...</p>
  
  <p>anyone please help?</p>