Converting Microsoft Word special characters with PHP

Question

I am trying to convert Word text pasted by users that contain MS Word ellipsis and long dash before processing it further.

I found an old proposed solution here to the problem http://www.codingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-47163.html , but it does not work for me. After replacing the ellipsis for example , the variable comes back as empty. Never seen anything like this before:

$src = "Long word dash – and weird Word ellipsis…";
$src = str_replace("‘", "'", $src);
$src = str_replace("’", "'", $src);
$src = str_replace("”", '"', $src);
$src = str_replace("“", '"', $src);
$src = str_replace("–", "-", $src);
$src = str_replace("…", "...", $src);
print $src;

Any ideas?

Answer 1

For anyone getting the diamond question mark in PHP, this method of replacing UTF-8 characters worked better than using the chr function.

$search = [                 // www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/<NUM>/ <NUM> = 2018
                "\xC2\xAB",     // « (U+00AB) in UTF-8
                "\xC2\xBB",     // » (U+00BB) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x98", // ‘ (U+2018) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x99", // ’ (U+2019) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9A", // ‚ (U+201A) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9B", // ‛ (U+201B) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9C", // “ (U+201C) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9D", // ” (U+201D) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9E", // „ (U+201E) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x9F", // ‟ (U+201F) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\xB9", // ‹ (U+2039) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\xBA", // › (U+203A) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x93", // – (U+2013) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x94", // — (U+2014) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\xA6"  // … (U+2026) in UTF-8
    ];

    $replacements = [
                "<<", 
                ">>",
                "'",
                "'",
                "'",
                "'",
                '"',
                '"',
                '"',
                '"',
                "<",
                ">",
                "-",
                "-",
                "..."
    ];

    str_replace($search, $replacements, $string);