Replacing odd characters

[degroat]

Can someone tell me how to do a string replace to convert the little diamonds with question marks in them into a regular apostrophe?

These are what I'm talking about:

http://www.degroat.net/pix/diamondqmarks.gif

 

[skiflyer]

What's causing those to come up?

I'm pretty sure this is a unicode issue and not a string format issue, but I could be wrong... either way, perhaps you have an example of the problem in a real situation?

 

[jpadie]

i suspect you copied and pasted the text from MS Word or some other wordprocessor that has a "smartquote" or equivalent function.

in the php.net manual there is a search and replace function for this which i reproduce below:

function clean_string_input($input)
{
   $search = array(
       '/[\x60\x82\x91\x92\xb4\xb8]/i',            // single quotes
       '/[\x84\x93\x94]/i',                        // double quotes
       '/[\x85]/i',                                // ellipsis ...
       '/[\x00-\x0d\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f-\x9f]/i'    // all other non-ascii
   );
   $replace = array(
       '\'',
       '"',
       '...',
       ''
   );
   return preg_replace($search,$replace,$input);
}

 

[rrsub]

I get that alot when Mac users send me documents to cut and paste.