PEAR::SOAP encoding issue

[Simon Niederberger]

Hi all

I'm having some trouble with UTF8 / ISO-8859-1 encoding using a Webservice
based on PEAR::SOAP_Server. The client essentially sends an XML file as data
(i.e. XML-data wrapped in SOAP-XML envelope) to the server where it is
processed.

I've made sure the client sends data in ISO-8859-1, the XML data also has
this encoding set in the PI. However, the server seems to receive the data
as UTF8. Therefore, my german "umlaute" get all mangled up. Funny enough, it
seems if I run the client on an English Windows, the SOAP server gets UTF8,
if I run the same client (which sets the SOAP client encoding to ISO-8859-1
programmatically) on a German Windows, the encoding is ISO-8859-1 (statement
based on what mb_detect_encoding tells me).

Can someone enlighten me as to where encoding is important and I will have
to look into and where does it not matter.
- how do I force SOAP_Server to excpect ISO-8859-1 as request encoding?
$server->xml_encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'; ???
$server->response_encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'; ???
- are PHP internal strings always Unicode?
- how does domxml_open_mem work with encoding?

Thanks a lot
Simon