fixEncoding in PHP

I found this little function very useful in fixing strings that are not in utf-8 but need be converted .

<?php 
// Fixes the encoding to uf8 
function fixEncoding($in_str) 
{ 
  $cur_encoding = mb_detect_encoding($in_str) ; 
  if($cur_encoding == "UTF-8" && mb_check_encoding($in_str,"UTF-8")) 
    return $in_str; 
  else 
    return utf8_encode($in_str); 
} // fixEncoding 
?>