iconv utf-8 для транслитерации ascii в mod_php / apache2

Мне нужно сравнить строки и сопоставить имена друг с другом, даже если они написаны не одинаково. Например, DÉSIRÉ-Smith должен соответствовать Desireesmith , а также Desiree или Desi'ree Smith

. Поэтому у меня был следующий подход, который отлично работал в командной строке с использованием PHP -CLI:

Однако на моем веб-сайте работает Версия сервера: Apache / 2.2.14 (Ubuntu) работает PHP Версия 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.2 как модуль, который я всегда получаю просто знаки вопроса. The funny thing is that the error must occour in this line

$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string); // transliterate

because afterwards i can see every character that has not been transliterated, but those that should have been replaced by ascii chars become question signs.

i tried every possible combination of input/output string encoding and iconv internal, input and output encoding settings as well as locale settings. i even did chmod -R 777 /usr/lib/gconv and moved the to my working dir.

however i saw this bug reported ont he mailing list: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=44096

[2010-06-07 21:22 UTC] icovt at yahoo dot com
mod_php iconv() is not working properly if your apache is chrooted and you do not 
have the content of /usr/lib/gconv/ folder into your relative chroot path (i.e. 
/your/chroot/path/usr/lib/gconv/). 
You can simply do: 
cp /usr/lib/gconv/* /your/chroot/path/usr/lib/gconv/
... and re-try.

This was a fix for me, hope this could save time for somebody else.

P.S. Btw, initially iconv() called from command line (using php cli) was OK.

I tried that my www-data user is at home in /var/www/ and I ended up with the folder /var/www/usr/lib/gconv/ as well as /var/www/myproject/usr/lib/gconv/

FYI: I had encoding detection and transcoding functions to ensure the correct encodings to be passed, but removed them for the sake of clarity as they are not needed anwyay if you input utf8 strings everything should be fine...

Any ideas?