PHP 8.2: utf8_encode is deprecated

Problem/Motivation

PHP 8.2 notes that utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() are deprecated because they can introduce obscure bugs. More info here.

Steps to reproduce

Use of the functions are found in branch 7.x-2.x and below. 8.x and 3.x don't use these functions.

Proposed resolution

The functions convert strings between ISO-8859-1 (Also known as "Latin 1") and UTF-8 encodings. These functions do not attempt to detect the actual character encoding in a given text, and always convert character encodings between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, even if the source text is not encoded in ISO-8859-1.

So instead of assuming ISO-8859-1, it seems like the best approach is to first detect the encoding then to convert it.

Example:
mb_convert_encoding($item, "UTF-8", mb_detect_encoding($item));

Patch coming in a followup comment.