How to replace Microsoft-encoded quotes in PHP

php string encoding character-encoding
Misha M picture Misha M · Aug 11, 2009 · Viewed 62.7k times · Source

I need to replace Microsoft Word's version of single and double quotations marks (“ ” ‘ ’) with regular quotes (' and ") due to an encoding issue in my application. I do not need them to be HTML entities and I cannot change my database schema.

I have two options: to use either a regular expression or an associated array.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer

Justin Dominic picture Justin Dominic · Jul 7, 2011

I have found an answer to this question. You need just one line of code using iconv() function in php:

// replace Microsoft Word version of single  and double quotations marks (“ ” ‘ ’) with  regular quotes (' and ")
$output = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $input);

Related questions

How can I get a hex dump of a string in PHP?

I'm investigating encodings in PHP5. Is there some way to get a raw hex dump of a string? i.e. a hex representation of each of the bytes (not characters) in a string?

Read More
Convert a string to number and back to string?

I would like to know how I can convert a short ASCII string to a number (int, float, or numeric string). I saw a couple of posts here mentioned perfect hashes which seems like it might be what I need. …

Read More
How do I check if a string contains a specific word?

Consider: $a = 'How are you?'; if ($a contains 'are') echo 'true'; Suppose I have the code above, what is the correct way to write the statement if ($a contains 'are')?

Read More