Latin1 to UTF8 question

My RSS output replaces some elements.

[asantos]

Hi.
My CMS' mysql db collation is in latin1. I have a news module, that has an optional RSS2.0 file. Partial example of rss.php:

header('Content-type: application/xml; charset="UTF-8"',true);
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
echo "\n";
echo '<rss version="2.0">';
echo "\n";
echo '<channel>';
echo "\n";
echo '<title>'.get_option('title').'</title>';
echo "\n";
echo '<link>'.URL.'</link>';
echo "\n";
echo '<description>'.get_option('description').'</description>';
...

The problem is that some data in "description" contains some of this characters: αινσϊ, and they all get converted to a '?'.

How can I avoid this problem and still show the appropiate character in the rss output? Is there a way to convert the get_option('description') to utf8 data?

Thanks,
Andres

[asantos]

nevermind, i found the utf8_encode() php function.