Overcome Encoding Problems with PHP, SoapServer, UTF-8, and non English Characters?

I'm having problems getting PHP to play nicely with SoapServer + UTF-8. Anytime anyone sends a Soap Request with non english characters (i.e. funny quotes, accented characters, etc) the SoapServer throws an exception saying "Bad Request." I've tried decoding the request with utf8_decode and even HTML Special Characters encoded the text. Nothing is working for me.

I'm looking for a point in the right direction because I'm lost at the moment.

From stackoverflow

• make sure both SoapServer and SoapClient are initialized with UTF-8 encoding:

  $client = new SoapClient("some.wsdl", array('encoding'=>'UTF-8'));
  $server = new SoapServer("some.wsdl", array('encoding'=>'UTF-8'));
  

  does the XML of the requests with the "funny quotes, accented characters, etc." validate?

• An obvious next step would be to verify that the request you receive is actually encoded as UTF-8. A network sniffer like WireShark (or even just a bit of work with a plain old telnet client could work) would let you examine the exact data passed to the server. Look through that and verify that it is actually valid UTF-8.

  StuffMaster : Using utf8_encode() on the soap response can help. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1347019/problems-with-special-characters-in-php-soap-client