Converting a Word document into usable HTML in PHP

Question

I have a set of Word documents which I want to publish using a PHP tool I've written. I copy and paste the Word documents into a text box and then save them into MySQL using the PHP program. The problem I Have arises from all the non-standard characters that Word documents have, like curly quotes and ellipses ("..."). What I do at the moment is manually search and replace these kinds of things (and also foreign symbols such as e-acute) with either plain text or HTML entities (&eacute ; etc) Is there a function in PHP I can call that will take the output of a Word document and convert everything that should be entities into entities, and other symbols that don't display properly in Firefox into symbols that do display.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This has served me well in the past:

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

Answer 2

A better solution would be to ensure that your database is set-up to support UTF-8 characters. The additional characters available in the extended set should cover all the "non-standard" characters that you're talking about.

Otherwise, if you really must convert these characters into HTML entities, use htmlentities().