weird characters in the url

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
CodeIgniter User Guide - Text Helper

convert_accented_characters()

Transliterates high ASCII characters to low ASCII equivalents, useful when non-English characters need to be used where only standard ASCII characters are safely used, for instance, in URLs.

Code:

$string = convert_accented_characters($string);

This function uses a companion config file application/config/foreign_chars.php to define the to and from array for transliteration.

InsiteFX