Halfslide Design - Austin Texas Website Design

I’ve run into situations where I’ve installed content management systems for customers who like to add their own content and/or copy content from documents they’ve created. Often, this results in them copying non-ASCII characters such as smart quotes, elipsis, or em dashses. I’m not sure why (maybe someone can educate me by posting a comment below) that PHP can’t handle these characters, but I’ve come up with a way to replace these characters with characters or character sequences that PHP understands. The function is below.

function cleanString($string) {
  $find[] = '“';  // left side double smart quote
  $find[] = '”';  // right side double smart quote
  $find[] = "‘";  // left side single smart quote
  $find[] = "’";  // right side single smart quote
  $find[] = '…';  // elipsis
  $find[] = '—';  // em dash
  $find[] = '–';

  $replace[] = '"';
  $replace[] = '"';
  $replace[] = "'";
  $replace[] = "'";
  $replace[] = '...';
  $replace[] = '-';
  $replace[] = '-';

  return str_replace($find, $replace, $string);
}

The function essentially is a very simple string replacement that attempts to match an invalid character with a valid character and output the change.  This will prevent the weird diamonds or boxes that you may be seeing in text output using “echo” in php.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.