How to replace Microsoft-encoded quotes in PHP

Question

I need to replace Microsoft Word 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 1

Considering you only want to replace a few specific and well identified characters, I would go for str_replace with an array : you obviously don't need the heavy artillery regex will bring you ;-)

And if you encounter some other special characters (damn copy-paste from word...), you can just add them to that array whenever is necessary / whenever they are identified.

EDIT : the best answer I can give to your comment is probably this link : Convert Smart Quotes with PHP

And the associated code (quoting that page) :

function convert_smart_quotes($string) 
{ 
    $search = array(chr(145), 
                    chr(146), 
                    chr(147), 
                    chr(148), 
                    chr(151)); 

    $replace = array("'", 
                     "'", 
                     '"', 
                     '"', 
                     '-'); 

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

(I don't have MS word on this computer, so I can't test by myself)

I don't remember exactly what we used at work (I was not the one having to deal with that kind of input), but it was the same kind of stuff...

Answer 2

Your Microsoft-encoded quotes are the probably the typographic quotation marks. You can simply replace them with str_replace if you know the encoding of the string in that you want to replace them.

Here’s an example for UTF-8 but using a single mapping array with strtr:

$quotes = array(
    "\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
);
$str = strtr($str, $quotes);

If you’re need another encoding, you can use mb_convert_encoding to convert the keys.

Answer 3

We used the following. Deals with a few more special characters.

$text = str_replace(chr(130), ',', $text);    // baseline single quote
$text = str_replace(chr(132), '"', $text);    // baseline double quote
$text = str_replace(chr(133), '...', $text);  // ellipsis
$text = str_replace(chr(145), "'", $text);    // left single quote
$text = str_replace(chr(146), "'", $text);    // right single quote
$text = str_replace(chr(147), '"', $text);    // left double quote
$text = str_replace(chr(148), '"', $text);    // right double quote

$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8');