Ok what I am looking for might be impossible /lmaosmiley.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":biglaugh:" border="0" alt="lmaosmiley.gif" /> but here I go:

I need some way of telling if the encoding/character set of a string is utf-8 or not..........

I have googled but all I can find that might mean anything is the multibyte extension but I can't rely on having that extension on the target machines.