@cjbottaro Correct.  What I'm doing is forcing the encoding to appear to be UTF-8 if it isn't already UTF-8 or if the current encoding is invalid.  Then we actually encode the string to UTF-16, which will execute because the current string is UTF-8.  Then we encode the string again back to UTF-8.  By going 8-16-8, we are ensuring that the encoding executes and any invalid characters get replaced with '?'.  Make sense?