How to fix characters, an example, Fotográfico because of the stress breaks the XML code?

There is text in the XML file, for example: Fotogr á fico because of what the structure of the XML file breaks, how to clean the line before output?

I do this echo $category = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $category); It works, but the letters are simply deleted, I would like to save them.

// TRANSLIT does not work correctly

Help to understand, please.