Converting Microsoft Word special characters with PHP

Question

I am trying to convert Word text pasted by users that contain MS Word ellipsis and long dash before processing it further.

I found an old proposed solution here to the problem http://www.codingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-47163.html , but it does not work for me. After replacing the ellipsis for example , the variable comes back as empty. Never seen anything like this before:

$src = "Long word dash – and weird Word ellipsis…";
$src = str_replace("‘", "'", $src);
$src = str_replace("’", "'", $src);
$src = str_replace("”", '"', $src);
$src = str_replace("“", '"', $src);
$src = str_replace("–", "-", $src);
$src = str_replace("…", "...", $src);
print $src;

Any ideas?

Answer 1

For anyone getting the diamond question mark in PHP, this method of replacing UTF-8 characters worked better than using the chr function.

$search = [                 // www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/<NUM>/ <NUM> = 2018
                "\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
                "\xE2\x80\x93", // – (U+2013) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\x94", // — (U+2014) in UTF-8
                "\xE2\x80\xA6"  // … (U+2026) in UTF-8
    ];

    $replacements = [
                "<<", 
                ">>",
                "'",
                "'",
                "'",
                "'",
                '"',
                '"',
                '"',
                '"',
                "<",
                ">",
                "-",
                "-",
                "..."
    ];

    str_replace($search, $replacements, $string);

Answer 2

Hmm. I use this function for sanitizing text copied into an RTE. It may or may not work in this case. It converts to HTML entities, but you could tweak it to just convert to regular characters:

function convertFromCP1252($string)
{
    $search = array('&',
                    '<',
                    '>',
                    '"',
                    chr(212),
                    chr(213),
                    chr(210),
                    chr(211),
                    chr(209),
                    chr(208),
                    chr(201),
                    chr(145),
                    chr(146),
                    chr(147),
                    chr(148),
                    chr(151),
                    chr(150),
                    chr(133),
                    chr(194)
                );

     $replace = array(  '&amp;',
                        '&lt;',
                        '&gt;',
                        '&quot;',
                        '&#8216;',
                        '&#8217;',
                        '&#8220;',
                        '&#8221;',
                        '&#8211;',
                        '&#8212;',
                        '&#8230;',
                        '&#8216;',
                        '&#8217;',
                        '&#8220;',
                        '&#8221;',
                        '&#8211;',
                        '&#8212;',
                        '&#8230;',
                        ''
                    );

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