Anyone knows how to get rid of these strange characters

Hi,

I have a csv/text file with the following strange characters

’ should be a curly apostrophe

“ should be the curly "

Is there a way I can parse/export this file so I get regular characters
Thanks

That sounds like a paste from MS Word.

The best method, I think, is to use str_replace() on them and replace them with the decimal equivalents here:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html

Note that the left and right curly single and double quotes are 4 separate characters.

I tried this without success
$search = array(’„’, ’“’, ’’’, ’’’, ’,Äô’, ’,Äú’, ’”’, ’“’);
$replace = array(’"’, ’"’, "’", "’", "’", ’"’, ’"’, ’"’);
return trim(htmlentities(str_replace($search, $replace, $str), ENT_QUOTES));

My guess is that ’,Äô’ is not actually a string. It is a representation of an unknown character.

Maybe the export was done using a strange character set. Maybe the file needs to be exported again.

Quote from: cipa at Nov 18, 2010, 08:06 AM

I tried this without success
$search = array(’„’, ’“’, ’’’, ’’’, ’,Äô’, ’,Äú’, ’”’, ’“’);
$replace = array(’"’, ’"’, "’", "’", "’", ’"’, ’"’, ’"’);
return trim(htmlentities(str_replace($search, $replace, $str), ENT_QUOTES));

My guess is that ’,Äô’ is not actually a string. It is a representation of an unknown character.

Maybe the export was done using a strange character set. Maybe the file needs to be exported again.

I always end up looking at the file in a hex editor in these situations.

http://www.softcircuits.com/cygnus/fe/