apostrophe problems in various browsers

160 Posts

insomnix Reply #1, 12 years, 4 months ago

I am getting a little frustrated. I have developed a web program to help track progress notes. Most people are not having any problems, but a handful post notes and instead of an apostrophe we see things like "â€™" in the database. It appears to be something Google Chrome is doing, not sure if any others are. I am using a formit hook to pass values from the form to a snippet to save to the db. I thought xpdo was supposed to handle these types of things. Does anyone have a solution that wont interfere with what xpdo already does? I have attached a portion of my code for your review.

//get values from post into array
if($hook->getValue('rid')){
  $entry = $modx->getObject('Progress',$hook->getValue('rid'));
}else{
  $entry = $modx->newObject('Progress');
}
$entry->fromArray($scriptProperties['fields']);

//convert time to 24 hour format
$entry->set('ProgStart',DATE("H:i", STRTOTIME($entry->get('ProgStart'))));
$entry->set('ProgEnd',DATE("H:i", STRTOTIME($entry->get('ProgEnd'))));

//get the difference between strating and ending
$time_difference = $notefunc->get_time_difference( $entry->get('ProgStart') , $entry->get('ProgEnd') );
$time_total = $time_difference['hours']*60 + $time_difference['minutes'];

//make sure start time comes before end time within 8 hour period
if( $time_total > 480 ){
$hook->addError('error_message','Can not enter more than eight hours at a time.');
return false;
}

/* save */
if ($entry->save() == false) {
    $hook->addError('error_message','Unable to save entry to the database.');
}

☆ A M B ☆
24,524 Posts

sottwell Reply #2, 12 years, 4 months ago

Looks like they're pasting from Word or some other rich-text type editor and the character being used by that editor is not being handled well by your database character set.

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24,544 Posts

BobRay Reply #3, 12 years, 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure that's an MS Word smart quote. In Word it renders as a left or right "curly" quote.

If you plug this code in near the top, it should fix things:

<?php 

$entry = convert_smart_quotes($entry);
 
function convert_smart_quotes($entry) 
{ 
    $search = array(chr(145), 
                    chr(146), 
                    chr(147), 
                    chr(148), 
                    chr(151)); 
 
    $replace = array("'", 
                     "'", 
                     '"', 
                     '"', 
                     '-'); 
 
    return str_replace($search, $replace, $entry); 
} 
 
?>

The last one converts an em dasy to a hyphen. You might rather convert it to "—" depending on how it will be used.

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160 Posts

insomnix Reply #4, 12 years, 4 months ago

After reading scottwells post earlier, I did some reading and found the same thing bobray posted. For some reason it didn't work, though I saw it on several websites. I did finally find what I thought was a fairly elegant solution, but if someone has something better I'm all ears.

First I run through this, which works beautifully for removing my "smart apostrophes":

$entry->set('ProgNotes', iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $entry->get('ProgNotes') ) );

Then just to make sure I get rid of all the obnoxious Microsoft formatting I put in a second line to get rid of everything else the first line may not change:

$entry->set('ProgNotes', preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $entry->get('ProgNotes') ) );

While I'm not 100% that this is the best approach, it is the only one that worked after several attempts to solve this annoying problem.

Thanks for the feedback guys, it helped.

25 Posts

simonp98 Reply #5, 12 years, 4 months ago

Try checking that your database character set, collation and connection are consistent. If your modx installation is using UTF8, check that your custom table is using the same charset and collation. If the problem is only appearing in the DB after the note is saved, then this could be the issue.

Let me now if this helps ...

24,544 Posts

BobRay Reply #6, 12 years, 4 months ago

If you find that the charsets are not consistent, see this: http://bobsguides.com/convert-db-utf8.html

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