$title_clean = substr($title,0,-3);
In the above example the last 3 characters will be removed from the string "$title". You can of course have the last X removed by changing -3 to -X........
This is basically URL decoding to the decimal code but nothing in PHPworks how you'd expect it.
Here are online tools to verify and check your work, it's important when querying databases with non-English characters:
http://yehg.net/encoding/index.php#
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/
http://www.codetable.net/decimal/65398
Japanese:
http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/bylanguage/japanesechartkatakana.html
Charat code for PHP:........