Encoding MSWord smart quotes

[paulC]

Any suggestions on how to deal with form input (PHP and MySQL) that includes MSWord smart quotes? One of the sites I run has a conference presentation submission form, lots of the people submitting proposals write them up in Word, paste them into the form box, and submit, with the end result being that the smart quotes (and em dashes, etc) come out garbled. I've tried using a PHP function to convert the MS content to standard web-safe entities, but it doesn't seem to be working. What can I do to get around this??

[Buddha]

Check out: http://jon.hedley.net/convert-ms-word-to-plain-text

Nice little Javascript (embedded) on that page.

[sdjl]

I had this problem with some of the users on my blog site. They like to use word and then submit a post, which is fine, unless you want to use RSS and then it goes pear shaped.
I made this little piece of code up to change the formatting when a post was inserted. It works well enough for me, so i can't see why it wouldn't work for you

// Remove MS word formatting
$writing = str_replace("’", "'", $writing);
$writing = str_replace("‘", "'", $writing);
$writing = str_replace('“', '"', $writing);
$writing = str_replace('”', '"', $writing);
$writing = str_replace("…", "...", $writing); 

David

[-Oz-]

What david does is exactly what i do. So go with that.

[sdjl]

It's pretty efficient if you're inserting the data into a text file or database.
I also encode £ (pound signs) into their ASCII counterpart. For some reason, RSS (or is it XML?) can't deal with them. Most odd

David

[anguz]

David, so RSS can't deal with ASCII? What about HTML entities? I've never used RSS before, so I'm not familiar.

About the replace, I'd probably write that like this

strtr($txt, array('?’' => "'", '‘' => "'", '?“' => '"', '?”' => '"', '?…' => '...'));

[sdjl]

Oh no, it can handle ASCII characters, it just can't handle their literal character.
So £ as it shows won't work, but it's ASCII representation will work fine.

[paulC]

Thanks for the suggestions. I used a function from the php website in the end, to achieve something similar to what David suggested. The page's html encoding seems to be important, too.