How can I convert HTML character references (ף) to regular UTF-8?

[Protoscan18]

I have some hebrew websites that contains character references like: \[code\]נוף\[/code\]I can only view these letters if I save the file as .html and view in UTF-8 encoding.If I try to open it as a regular text file then UTF-8 encoding does not show the proper output.I noticed that if I open a text editor and write hebrew in UTF-8, each character takes two bytes not 4 bytes line in this example (\[code\]ו\[/code\])Any ideas if this is UTF-16 or any other kind of UTF representation of letters?How can I convert it to normal letters if possible?Using latest PHP version.