How to convert multi-byte punctuations to single byte ones with PHP?

Question

For example,both ， and , are commas,but the first one takes 2 byte,while the second one only 1.

How to convert the 2 byte one to 1 byte?

Answer 1

Use iconv() with the correct input and output character sets.

Answer 2

You can use iconv with the translit option (e.g., ASCII/TRANSLIT or ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT, etc. depending on how you serve your content). I haven't tried this out, but I believe it will work.

If you're not sure what the incoming charset will be, you probably want to use mb_detect_encoding to detect it, because iconv will freak out if it encounters a character it doesn't expect.

You may wish to read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets for a painless intro to the subject, if you're unfamiliar with charsets.