I am not sure where to start with this, but here is what I want to do:
Users have a textfield where they need to input few words. Problem is that page will use people from different countries, and they will enter "weird" Latin characters like: ž, Ä, Ü, đ, Ť, Á etc.
Before saving to base I want to convert them to z, a, u, d, t, a... Is there a way to do this without making something like this (I think there is too much characters to cover):
$string = str_replace(array('Č','Ä','Á','đ'), array('C','A','A','d'), $string);
And, yes, I know that I can save utf-8 in database, but problem is that this string will later be sent by SMS, and because of sms protocol nature, these "special" chars use more space in message than regular English alphabet characters (I am limited to 120 chars, and if i put "Ä" in message, it will take more than 1 character place).
First of all, I would still store the original characters in utf-8 in the database. You can always "translate" them to ASCII characters upon retrieval. This is good because if, say, in the future SMS adds UTF-8 support (or you want to use user data for something else), you'll have the original characters intact.
That said, you can use iconv to do this:
iconv('utf-8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT', $input); //where $input contains "weird" characters
See this thread for more info, including some caveats of this approach: PHP: Replace umlauts with closest 7-bit ASCII equivalent in an UTF-8 string
Close but not perfect because it converts the accents and things into characters.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php
echo iconv("ISO-8859-1", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", 'Martín');
//output: Mart'in
echo iconv("ISO-8859-1", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", "ÆÇÈÊÈÒÐÑÕ");
//output: AEC`E^E`E`OD~N~O
Using
echo iconv('utf-8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT', 'Martín');
//output: Mart
If the accented character is not UTF-8, it just cuts off the string from the special char onwards.
Related
In my page I convert lower to uppercase string and output 'em in the title tag. First I had the issue that   is not accepted, so I had to preserve entities.
So I converted them to unicode, then uppercase and then back to htmlentities:
echo htmlentities(strtoupper(html_entity_decode(ob_get_clean())));
Now I have the problem that I recognized related to a "right single quote". I'm getting this character as ’ in the title.
It seems that either of the two functions I'm using does not convert them correctly. Is there any better function that I can use or is there something especially for the title tag?
Edit: Here is a var_dump of the original data which I don't have influence to:
string(74) "Example example example » John Doe- Who’s That? "
Edit II: This is what my code above results in:
This would happen, if I would just use strtoupper:
Your problem is that strtoupper will destroy your UTF-8 entity-decoded input because it is not multibyte aware. In this instance, ’ decodes to the hex-encoded UTF-8 sequence e2 80 99. But in strtoupper's single-byte world, the character with code \xe2 is â, which is converted to  (\xc2) -- which makes your text an invalid UTF-8 sequence.
Simply use mb_strtoupper instead.
It's ugly, but it might work for you (although I would certainly suggest Jon's solution):
After your strtoupper(), you can replace all uppercased HTMLentities this way:
$entity_table = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
$entity_table_uc = array_map('strtoupper', $entity_table);
$string = str_replace($entity_table_uc, $entity_table, $string);
This should remove the need for htmlentities() / html_entity_decode().
I am trying to write some code to take UTF-8 text and create a slug that contains some UTF-8 characters. So this is not about transliterating UTF-8 into ASCII.
So basically I want to replace any UTF-8 character that is whitespace, a control character, punctuation, or a symbol with a dash. There exist Unicode categories that I should be able to use: \p{Z}, \p{C}, \p{P}, or \p{S}, respectively.
So I could do something as simple as this:
preg_replace("#(\p{P}|\p{C}|\p{S}|\p{Z})+#", "-", "This. test? has an ö in it");
but it results in this:
This-test-has-an-√-in-it
(and I'd want This-test-has-an-ö-in-it)
It butchers the umlaut o, possibly because in Unicode it is comprised of two bytes c3b6 of which the b6 seems to be recognized as a punctuation character (so the \p{P} matches here). The c3 remains in the text. This is strange because AFAIK a single byte b6 doesn't exist in UTF-8.
I also tried the same thing in Perl in order to make sure it is not a PHP problem, but the code
$s = 'This. test? has an ö in it';
$s =~ s/(\p{P}|\p{C}|\p{S}|\p{Z})+/-/g;
also produces:
This-test-has-an-√-in-it
(which probably makes sense as PHP's PCRE are Perl Compatible Regular Expressions)
While when I do this in Python
import regex as re
text=u"This. test? has an ö in it";
print re.sub(ur"(\p{P}|\p{C}|\p{S}|\p{Z})+", "-", text)
it produces my desired
This-test-has-an-ö-in-it
What to do?
The solution was to use the "Unicode modifier" u:
preg_replace("#(\p{P}|\p{C}|\p{S}|\p{Z})+#u", "-", "This. test? has an ö in it");
correctly produces
This-test-has-an-ö-in-it
So: using Unicode Categories without the Unicode modifier produces strange results without any warning.
I need to "flatten out" a number of Unicode strings for the purposes of indexing and searching. For example, I need to convert GötheФ€ into ASCII. The last two characters have no close representations in ASCII so it's Ok to discard them completely. So what I expect from
echo iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", "GötheФ€");
is Gothe but instead it outputs Gothe?EUR.
In addition to letters, I'd also like all the variety of Unicode numerals and punctuation marks, such as periods, commas, dashes, slashes etc. to be replaced by their closest ASCII counterparts, which is something ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE in iconv function does already but not without producing some garbage output for the Unicode characters for which it's not able to find any ASCII replacements. I'd like such characters to be totally ignored.
How do get the expected result? Is there a better way, perhaps using intl library?
You've picked a hard problem. It is better to tell the user entering Unicode characters to transliterate ASCII themselves. Doing it for them will only upset them when they disagree with your transliteration.
Anything you do will likely be jarring and offensive to people who place great meaning on Diacritics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic
No matter what transliteration strategy you use, you will not please everyone, since different people prescribe different meanings to different characters. A transliteration that delights one person will enrage another. You won't make everyone happy unless you let everyone use whatever character they want in Unicode.
But life is jarring and offensive, so off we go:
This PHP Code:
function toASCII( $str )
{
return strtr(utf8_decode($str),
utf8_decode(
'ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýÿ'),
'SOZsozYYuAAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOOUUUUYsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiionoooooouuuuyy');
}
What the above PHP function does is replace each Unicode character in the first parameter of utf8_decode and replaces it with the corresponding character in the second parameter of utf8_decode.
For example the Unicode À is transliterated to ASCII A, and the å is converted to a. You'll have to specify this for every single Unicode character that you believe transliterates to an ASCII character. For the others, remove them or run them through another transliteration algorithm.
There are 95,221 other characters that you will have to look at which might transliterate to ASCII. It becomes an existential game of "When is an A no longer an A?". What about the Klingon characters and the road-map signs that kind of look like an A? The fish character kind of looks like an a. Who is to say what is what?
This is a lot of work, but if you are cleaning database input, you have to create a white list of characters and block out the other barbarians, keeping them out at the moat, it's the only reliable way.
is there a way to transfer Latin letters to english letters with php?
Such as: āáǎà transfer to a,
ēéěè transfer to e,
īíǐì transfer to i,
... // there may be dozens which are main in Germany, French, Italian, Spain...
PS: how to transfer punctuation mark use php? I also want to transfer %20 to a space, transfer %27 to '. Thank u.
iconv can usually do this for you:
iconv("utf-8", "ascii//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", $string);
Adjust source encoding to preference. The //TRANSLIT//IGNORE part tells iconv to transliterate (replace with "similar" characters) whatever it can and ignore (leave out or replace with "?", can't remember) what it can't.
Have a look at How to change diacritic characters to non-diacritic ones
I am trying to replace a certain character in a string with another. They are quite obscure latin characters. I want to replace character (hex) 259 with 4d9, so I tried this:
str_replace("\x02\x59","\x04\xd9",$string);
This didn't work. How do I go about this?
**EDIT: Additional information.
Thanks bobince, that has done the trick. Although, I want to replace the uppercase schwa also and it is not working for some reason. I calculated U+018F (Ə) as UTF-8 0xC68F and this is to be replaced with U+04D8 (0xD398):
$string = str_replace("\xC9\x99", "\xD3\x99", $_POST['string_with_schwa']); //lc 259->4d9
$string = str_replace( "\xC6\8F", "\xD3\x98" , $string); //uc 18f->4d8
I am copying the 'Ə' into a textbox and posting it. The first str_replace works fine on the lowercase, but does not detect the uppercase in the second str_replace, strange. It remains as U+018F. Guess I could run the string through strtolower but this should work though.
U+0259 Latin Small Letter Schwa is only encoded as the byte sequence 0x02,0x59 in the UTF-16BE encoding. It is very unlikely you will be working with byte strings in the UTF-16BE encoding as it's not an ASCII-compatible encoding and almost no-one uses it.
The encoding you want to be working with (the only ASCII-superset encoding to support both Latin Schwa and Cyrillic Schwa, as it supports all Unicode characters) is UTF-8. Ensure your input is in UTF-8 format (if it is coming from form data, serve the page containing the form as UTF-8). Then, in UTF-8, the character U+0259 is represented using the byte sequence 0xC9,0x99.
str_replace("\xC9\x99", "\xD3\x99", $string);
If you make sure to save your .php file as UTF-8-no-BOM in the text editor, you can skip the escaping and just directly say:
str_replace('ə', 'ә', $string);
A couple of possible suggestions. Firstly, remember that you need to assign the new value to $string, i.e.:
$string = str_replace("\x02\x59","\x04\xd9",$string);
Secondly, verify that your byte stream occurs in the $string. I mention this because your hex string begins with a low-byte, so you'll need to make sure your $string is not UTF8 encoded.