How do I convert Word smart quotes and em dashes i

Question

I have a form with a textarea. Users enter a block of text which is stored in a database.

Occasionally a user will paste text from Word containing smart quotes or emdashes. Those characters appear in the database as: –, ’, “ ,â€

What function should I call on the input string to convert smart quotes to regular quotes and emdashes to regular dashes?

I am working in PHP.

Update: Thanks for all of the great responses so far. The page on Joel's site about encodings is very informative: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Some notes on my environment:

The MySQL database is using UTF-8 encoding. Likewise, the HTML pages that display the content are using UTF-8 (Update:) by explicitly setting the meta content-type.

On those pages the smart quotes and emdashes appear as a diamond with question mark.

Solution:

Thanks again for the responses. The solution was twofold:

1. Make sure the database and HTML files were explicitly set to use UTF-8 encoding.
2. Use htmlspecialchars() instead of htmlentities().

Answer 1

We would often use standard string replace functions for that. Even though the nature of ASCII/Unicode in that context is pretty murky, it works. Just make sure your php file is saved in the right encoding format, etc.

Answer 2

You could try mb_ convert_encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');

This assumes you want UTF-8, and convert can find reasonable replacements... if not, mb_str_replace or preg_replace them yourself.

Answer 3

This may not be the best solution, but I'd try testing to find out what PHP sees. Let's say it sees "–" (there are a few other possibilities, like simple "“" or maybe "“"). Then do a str_replace to get rid of all of those and replace them with normal quotes, before stuffing the answer in a database.

The better solution would probably involve making the end-to-end data passing all UTF-8, as people are trying to help with in other answers.

Answer 4

The mysql database is using UTF-8 encoding. Likewise, the html pages that display the content are using UTF-8.

The content of the HTML can be in UTF-8, yes, but are you explicitly setting the content type (encoding) of your HTML pages (generated via PHP?) to UTF-8 as well? Try returning a Content-Type header of "text/html;charset=utf-8" or add <meta> tags to your HTMLs:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/>

That way, the content type of the data submitted to PHP will also be the same.

I had a similar issue and adding the <meta> tag worked for me.

Answer 5

You have to be sure your database connection is configured to accept and provide UTF-8 from and to the client (otherwise it will convert to the "default", which is usually latin1).

In practice this means running a query SET NAMES 'utf8';

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Also, smart quotes are part of the windows-1252 character set, not iso-8859-1 (latin-1). Not very relevant to your problem, but just FYI. The euro symbol is in there as well.

Answer 6

Actually the problem is not happening in PHP but it is happening in JavaScript, it is due to copy/paste from Word, so you need to solve your problem in JavaScript before you pass your text to PHP, Please see this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/6219023/1857295.