Sick of users copying and pasting Word content into your web forms? We all know you end up with all their special characters ending up as ? in your text. This recently happened to me and I had to fix it, see these were college essays on the undergraduate application.
This is what I used to convert them to html friendly characters :
function convert_raw_utf8_smart_quotes($string) { $search = array(chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x98), chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x99), chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x9c), chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x9d), chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x93), chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x94)); $replace = array('‘', '’', '“', '”', '–', '—'); return str_replace($search, $replace, $string); }
This worked great until I had to pump out a PDF file for admissions using this content, and the above & codes don’t look so pretty. So I played a little music chairs with the code and ended up calling this when I had to display the code in the PDF file –
function convert_smart_quotes_for_PDF ($string) { #this reverses the process for the PDF rendering $search = array('‘', '’', '“', '”', '–', '—'); $replace= array("'", "'", '"', '"', '-', '-'); return str_replace($search, $replace, $string); }
Enjoy