I have this text...
“I’m not trying to be credible,†David admits with a smile broadening"
...and I would like to delete those funny characters, I've tried str_replace() but it does not work.
Any ideas?
You probably have handled text in a different encoding then its source encoding.
So if the text is UTF-8, you are not handling it currently as UTF-8. The easiest way is to send a header such as...
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
You could also add the meta element, but ensure it is the first child of your head element.
You need to fix that at the source instead of trying to patch it later (which will never work well).
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
...
</head>
Different sources often have different encodings, so you need to specify the encoding in which you are presenting the view. Utf-8 is the most popular, since it covers all of ASCII and many, many other languages.
php's utf8_(de)encode converts iso-8859-1 to utf-8 and the opposite and regular string manipulating functions are not multibyte-(which utf-8 can be) character aware. Either you use functions specific to mb_strings or enable encoding with certain parameters.
//comment if i'm mistaken
Well, you are using a different character encoding that you should probably use(you should be using utf-8 encoding), so I would change that instead of trying to just fix it on the spot with a quick-fix(you will run into less problems overall that way).
If you really want to fix it using PHP, you can use the ctype_alpha() function; you should be able to do something like this:
$theString = "your text here"; // your input string
$newString = ""; // your new string
$i = 0;
while($theString[$i]) // while there are still characters in the string
{
if(ctype_alpha($theString[$i]) // if it's a character in your current set
{
$newString .= $theString[$i]; // add it to the new string, increment pointer, and go to next loop iteration
$i++;
continue;
} // if the specific character at the $i index is an alphabetical character, add it to the new string
else
{
$i++;
} // if it's a bad character, just move the pointer up by one for the next iteration
}
Then use $newString however you want to. Really though, just change your character encoding instead of doing it this way. You want the encoding to be the same across your entire project.
Related
I'm trying to build a search page for a bunch of menu items in my database which often contain special characters like é (as in sautéed), and so I want to convert both the search query and the database content to regular alphabets, and I'm having trouble. I'm using ISO-8859-1 so that special characters will display properly on the website, and I get the feeling this is hindering my attempts at conversion...
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
The search query is sent to search.php using the GET method, so the query "sautéed" will appear like this in the address bar:
search.php?q=saut%E9ed
This is the function I'm trying to build, that's not working:
$q = $_GET['q'];
function clean_str($a) {
$fix = array('é' => 'e');
$str = str_replace(array_keys($fix), array_values($fix), $a);
return $str;
}
$fixed = clean_str($q); // currently has no effect
I'm tried using %29 as the array key, as well as the HTML character code (é). I've tried utf8_encode($q); to no avail. Other characters like ! and + work fine in the clean_str() function, but not special alphabets like é.
Though you might want to reconsider the way you're doing this, as has been suggested, I believe this will get you there.
function clean_str($a) {
$fix = array('é' => 'e');
$str = str_replace(array_keys($fix), array_values($fix), $a);
return $str;
}
$fixed = clean_str(utf8_encode($_GET['q'])); // return an encoded utf8 string.
echo $fixed;
For more on utf8_encode see here.
To wit, é is the regular alphabet in several languages =) While you're suggesting you would like to know how to covert the text to ASCII (which English speakers may consider 'regular') what you really should be doing is working with the modern web's most permissive encoding, which is UTF8.
That way, you will be able to accept input in any language, save it, process it, and serve it back up, without needing to normalise or ill-convert to another codepage.
Serve your pages with <meta charset="utf-8"> in the source code, and an http content header to indicate UTF8 encoding, and things should go a lot smoother. (note that for the now defunct HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1/1.1 you will need to use the older meta tag syntax. Using those flavours for new projects is, however, very much not recommended)
I want to replace all £ to its HTML code £ => £ because it shows up as a ? in a diamond.
I am using the following code but it does nothing.
<?php
include ("config.php");
$get_id = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['id']);
$page_get = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM contents_page WHERE `id` = '$get_id'");
while($page_row = mysql_fetch_assoc($page_get)) {
$page_row["Page_Content"] = str_replace('£','£',$page_row[Page_Content]);
$smarty->assign('page_title', $page_row['Page_Title']);
$smarty->assign('page_content', $page_row['Page_Content']);
}
$smarty->display('page.tpl');
?>
I am using str_replace() but nothing happens its like it cannot see the £
I had an encoding problem myself. Go to the database and see if the data is being garbled or not. if it is not, then set your connection attributes like this SET CHAR UTF8 before you connect to the database..
$link1 = mysql_connect('localhost','user1','pass1',TRUE);
mysql_selectdb('db1',$link1);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link2);
The other solution is to see to what the input was encoded before it went to the database, and then change the charset to that
mysql_set_charset('latin1',$link2);
for example.
Any way, what I would do, I would still set my chars to utf-8 , output the results to the page.. see if the character is actually a pound sound, if it is a different symbol, I would put it in the string replace function instead of the pound symbol
Add this to the head tag of your page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
str_replace doesn't work for you because the encoding of the needle and the haystack are different and hence the character doesn't match. In fact, encoding is the only problem you need to care about, you don't need to replace anything. See http://kunststube.net/frontback for details on what you need to consider for encodings.
For some bigger picture background, also see What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text.
<?php
$link1 = mysql_connect('localhost','user1','pass1',TRUE);
mysql_selectdb('db1',$link1);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link1);
?>
You'll probably need something like a self-implemented mb_str_replace(), assuming that the pound symbol is not within the standard ascii set.
There is are multiple example implementation on that page:
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php
I -hope- that that's all you need, if you have to fully implement unicode it gets quite annoyingly complicated. It may be that you can avoid that if using the mb_str_replace contributed there doesn't work, you may have to turn unicode functionality on in the php ini in order for php to even recognize that the character you're trying to replace is a unicode one.
i just started dabbling in php and i'm afraid i need some help to figure out how to manipulate utf-8 strings.
I'm working in ubuntu 11.10 x86, php version 5.3.6-13ubuntu3.2. I have a utf-8 encoded file (vim :set encoding confirms this) which i then proceed to reading it using
$file = fopen("file.txt", "r");
while(!feof($file)){
$line = fgets($file);
//...
}
fclose($file);
using mb_detect_encoding($line) reports UTF-8
If i do echo $line I can see the line properly (no mangled characters) in the browser
so I guess everything is fine with browser and apache. Though i did search my apache configuration for AddDefaultCharset and tried adding http meta-tags for character encoding (just in case)
When i try to split the string using $arr = mb_split(';',$line) the fields of the resulting array contain mangled utf-8 characters (mb_detect_encoding($arr[0]) reports utf-8 as well).
So echo $arr[0] will result in something like this: ΑΘΗÎÎ.
I have tried setting mb_detect_order('utf-8'), mb_internal_encoding('utf-8'), but nothing changed. I also tried to manually detect utf-8 using this w3 perl regex because i read somewhere that mb_detect_encoding can sometimes fail (myth?), but results were the same as well.
So my question is how can i properly split the string? Is going down the mb_ path the wrong way? What am I missing?
Thank you for your help!
UPDATE: I'm adding sample strings and base64 equivalents (thanks to #chris' for his suggestion)
1. original string: "ΑΘΗΝΑ;ΑΙΓΑΛΕΩ;12242;37.99452;23.6889"
2. base64 encoded: "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkTvOkc6ZzpPOkc6bzpXOqTsxMjI0MjszNy45OTQ1MjsyMy42ODg5"
3. first part (the equivalent of "ΑΘΗΝΑ") base64 encoded before splitting: "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkQ=="
4. first part ($arr[0] after splitting): "ΑΘΗÎΑ"
5. first part after splitting base64 encoded: "77u/zpHOmM6Xzp3OkQ=="
Ok, so after doing this there seems to be a 77u/ difference between 3. and 5. which according to this is a utf-8 BOM mark. So how can i avoid it?
UPDATE 2: I woke up refreshed today and with your tips in mind i tried it again. It seems that $line=fgets($file) reads correctly the first line (no mangled chars), and fails for each subsequent line. So then i base64_encoded the first and second line, and the 77u/ bom appeared on the base64'd string of the first line only. I then opened up the offending file in vim, and entered :set nobomb :w to save the file without the bom. Firing up php again showed that the first line was also mangled now. Based on #hakre's remove_utf8_bom i added it's complementary function
function add_utf8_bom($str){
$bom= "\xEF\xBB\xBF";
return substr($str,0,3)===$bom?$str:$bom.$str;
}
and voila each line is read correctly now.
I do not much like this solution, as it seems very very hackish (i can't believe that an entire framework/language does not provide for a way to deal with nobombed strings). So do you know of an alternate approach? Otherwise I'll proceed with the above.
Thanks to #chris, #hakre and #jacob for their time!
UPDATE 3 (solution): It turns out after all that it was a browser thing: it was not enough to add header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') and meta-tags like <meta http-equiv="Content-type" value="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />. It also had to be properly enclosed inside an <html><body> section or the browser would not understand the encoding correctly. Thanks to #jake for his suggestion.
Morale of the story: I should learn more about html before trying coding for the browser in the first place. Thanks for your help and patience everyone.
UTF-8 has the very nice feature that it is ASCII-compatible. With this I mean that:
ASCII characters stay the same when encoded to UTF-8
no other characters will be encoded to ASCII characters
This means that when you try to split a UTF-8 string by the semicolon character ;, which is an ASCII character, you can just use standard single byte string functions.
In your example, you can just use explode(';',$utf8encodedText) and everything should work as expected.
PS: Since the UTF-8 encoding is prefix-free, you can actually use explode() with any UTF-8 encoded separator.
PPS: It seems like you try to parse a CSV file. Have a look at the fgetcsv() function. It should work perfectly on UTF-8 encoded strings as long as you use ASCII characters for separators, quotes, etc.
When you write debug/testing scripts in php, make sure you output a more or less valid HTML page.
I like to use a PHP file similar to the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=utf-8>
<title>Test page for project XY</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Test Page</h1>
<pre><?php
echo print_r($_GET,1);
?></pre>
</body>
</html>
If you don't include any HTML tags, the browser might interpret the file as a text file and all kinds of weird things could happen. In your case, I assume the browser interpreted the file as a Latin1 encoded text file. I assume it worked with the BOM, because whenever the BOM was present, the browser recognized the file as a UTF-8 file.
Edit, I just read your post closer. You're suggesting this should output false, because you're suggesting a BOM was introduced by mb_split().
header('content-type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');
$s = "zpHOmM6Xzp3OkTvOkc6ZzpPOkc6bzpXOqTsxMjI0MjszNy45OTQ1MjsyMy42ODg5";
$str = base64_decode($s);
$peices = mb_split(';', $str);
var_dump(substr($str, 0, 10) === $peices[0]);
var_dump($peices);
Does it? It works as expected for me( bool true, and the strings in the array are correct)
The mb_splitDocs function should be fine, but you should define the charset it's using as well with mb_regex_encodingDocs:
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
About mb_detect_encodingDocs: it can fail, but that's just by the fact that you can never detect an encoding. You either know it or you can try but that's all. Encoding detection is mostly a gambling game, however you can use the strict parameter with that function and specify the encoding(s) you're looking for.
How to remove the BOM mask:
You can filter the string input and remove a UTF-8 bom with a small helper function:
/**
* remove UTF-8 BOM if string has it at the beginning
*
* #param string $str
* #return string
*/
function remove_utf8_bom($str)
{
if ($bytes = substr($str, 0, 3) && $bytes === "\xEF\xBB\xBF")
{
$str = substr($str, 3);
}
return $str;
}
Usage:
$line = remove_utf8_bom($line);
There are probably better ways to do it, but this should work.
I'm currently scraping a website for various pieces of textual data (with permission, of course). The issue I'm seeing is that certain characters aren't correctly encoded in the process. This is particularly prominent with apostrophes ('): leading to characters such as: .
Currently, I use the following code to convert various HTML entities from the scraped data:
htmlentities($content, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8', FALSE)
Is there a better way to handle this sort of thing?
HTML entities have two goals:
Escape characters that have a special meaning in HTML, such as angle quotes, so they can be used as literals.
Display characters that are not supported by the character set you are using, such as the euro symbol in an ISO-8859-1 document.
They are not exactly an encoding tool.
If you want to convert from one charset into another one, I suggest you use iconv(). However, you must know both the source and the target charset. The source charset should be mentioned in the Content-Type response header and the target charset is something you decided when you started the site (although in your case it looks like UTF-8 is the most reasonable option).
You don't want to use htmlentities right away, I would use that on the data at the last point before you store it. One of the problems you'll run into is people don't always encode their entities properly anyway. Not everyone uses ™ they just copy the trademark in. If you put some logic in to try and grab whatever they put in and encode it properly you may be better off. For Example:
$patterns = array();
$patterns[0] = '/—/';
$patterns[1] = '/&nsbsp;/';
$patterns[2] = '/®/';
$replacements = array();
$replacements[2] = '&151;';
$replacements[1] = '&160;';
$replacements[0] = '&174;';
$ourhtml = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $html);
You could find all the "gotcha" characters like dashes and single quotes, apostrophes etc and encode them by hand, as well as use a set standard to the entities (text or numeric).
You could also use regular expressions to do the same thing, and would probably be a more elegant solution. But my suggestion would be to take some time filtering out what you don't want by hand, and then you know your data will be prepared exactly how you like.
It's a little bit difficult to suggest things based on the information provided. Can you provide an example snippet of text maybe?
Failing that, I'll employee the shotgun approach (e.g., suggesting a bunch of things and hoping one of them hits)
First of all, are you sure the page you're accessing is encoded in UTF-8? What does mb_detect_encoding say?
One option (may not work depending on your needs) would be to use iconv with the TRANSLIT option to convert the characters into something easier to handle using PHP. You could also look at using the mb_* functions for working with multibyte strings.
Are you sure htmlentities is the problem? If the content is UTF-8, and your site is set to serve ISO-8859-1, you're going to see odd characters. Check the encoding your browser is using to make sure it matches the encoding of the characters you're producing.
I don't see any issue with using htmlentities() as long as you pass false as the last parameter. This will ensure that you don't encode anything twice (such as turning & into &).
I'm writing a php program that pulls from a database source. Some of the varchars have quotes that are displaying as black diamonds with a question mark in them (�, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, I assume from Microsoft Word text).
How can I use php to strip these characters out?
If you see that character (� U+FFFD "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER") it usually means that the text itself is encoded in some form of single byte encoding but interpreted in one of the unicode encodings (UTF8 or UTF16).
If it were the other way around it would (usually) look something like this: ä.
Probably the original encoding is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1. You can check this without having to change your script: Browsers give you the option to re-interpret a page in a different encoding -- in Firefox use "View" -> "Character Encoding".
To make the browser use the correct encoding, add an HTTP header like this:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
or put the encoding in a meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Alternatively you could try to read from the database in another encoding (UTF-8, preferably) or convert the text with iconv().
I also faced this � issue. Meanwhile I ran into three cases where it happened:
substr()
I was using substr() on a UTF8 string which cut UTF8 characters, thus the cut chars could not be displayed correctly. Use mb_substr($utfstring, 0, 10, 'utf-8'); instead. Credits
htmlspecialchars()
Another problem was using htmlspecialchars() on a UTF8 string. The fix is to use: htmlspecialchars($utfstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
preg_replace()
Lastly I found out that preg_replace() can lead to problems with UTF. The code $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9ÄäÜüÖöß]/', ' ', $string); for example transformed the UTF string "F(×)=2×-3" into "F � 2� ". The fix is to use mb_ereg_replace() instead.
I hope this additional information will help to get rid of such problems.
This is a charset issue. As such, it can have gone wrong on many different levels, but most likely, the strings in your database are utf-8 encoded, and you are presenting them as iso-8859-1. Or the other way around.
The proper way to fix this problem, is to get your character-sets straight. The simplest strategy, since you're using PHP, is to use iso-8859-1 throughout your application. To do this, you must ensure that:
All PHP source-files are saved as iso-8859-1 (Not to be confused with cp-1252).
Your web-server is configured to serve files with charset=iso-8859-1
Alternatively, you can override the webservers settings from within the PHP-document, using header.
In addition, you may insert a meta-tag in you HTML, that specifies the same thing, but this isn't strictly needed.
You may also specify the accept-charset attribute on your <form> elements.
Database tables are defined with encoding as latin1
The database connection between PHP to and database is set to latin1
If you already have data in your database, you should be aware that they are probably messed up already. If you are not already in production phase, just wipe it all and start over. Otherwise you'll have to do some data cleanup.
A note on meta-tags, since everybody misunderstands what they are:
When a web-server serves a file (A HTML-document), it sends some information, that isn't presented directly in the browser. This is known as HTTP-headers. One such header, is the Content-Type header, which specifies the mimetype of the file (Eg. text/html) as well as the encoding (aka charset).
While most webservers will send a Content-Type header with charset info, it's optional. If it isn't present, the browser will instead interpret any meta-tags with http-equiv="Content-Type". It's important to realise that the meta-tag is only interpreted if the webserver doesn't send the header. In practice this means that it's only used if the page is saved to disk and then opened from there.
This page has a very good explanation of these things.
As mentioned in earlier answers, it is happening because your text has been written to the database in iso-8859-1 encoding, or any other format.
So you just need to convert the data to utf8 before outputting it.
$text = “string from database”;
$text = utf8_encode($text);
echo $text;
To make sure your MYSQL connection is set to UTF-8 (or latin1, depending on what you're using), you can do this to:
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$con);
or use this to check what charset you are using:
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
$charset = mysql_client_encoding($con);
echo "The current character set is: $charset\n";
More info here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php
I chose to strip these characters out of the string by doing this -
ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none");
$text= mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
Just Paste This Code In Starting to The Top of Page.
<?php
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
?>
Based on your description of the problem, the data in your database is almost certainly encoded as Windows-1252, and your page is almost certainly being served as ISO-8859-1. These two character sets are equivalent except that Windows-1252 has 16 extra characters which are not present in ISO-8859-1, including left and right curly quotes.
Assuming my analysis is correct, the simplest solution is to serve your page as Windows-1252. This will work because all characters that are in ISO-8859-1 are also in Windows-1252. In PHP you can change the encoding as follows:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1252');
However, you really should check what character encoding you are using in your HTML files and the contents of your database, and take care to be consistent, or convert properly where this is not possible.
Add this function to your variables
utf8_encode($your variable);
Try This Please
mb_substr($description, 0, 490, "UTF-8");
This will help you. Put this inside <head> tag
<meta charset="iso-8859-1">
That can be caused by unicode or other charset mismatch. Try changing charset in your browser, in of the settings the text will look OK. Then it's question of how to convert your database contents to charset you use for displaying. (Which can actually be just adding utf-8 charset statement to your output.)
what I ended up doing in the end after I fixed my tables was to back it up and change back the settings to utf-8 then I altered my dump file so that DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci are my character set entries
now I don't have characterset issues anymore because the database and browser are utf8.
I figured out what caused it. It was the web page+browser effects on the DB. On the terminals that are linux (ubuntu+firefox) it was encoding the database in latin1 which is what the tabes are set. But on the windows 10+edge terminals, the entries were force coded into utf8. Also I noticed the windows 10 has issues staying with latin1 so I decided to bend with the wind and convert all to utf8.
I figured it was a windows 10 issue because we started using win 10 terminals.
so yet again microsoft bugs causes issues. I still don't know why the encoding changes on the forms because the browser in windows 10 shows the latin1 characterset but when it goes in its utf8 encoded and I get the data anomaly. but in linux+firefox it doesn't do that.
This happened to work in my case:
$text = utf8_decode($text)
I turns the black diamond character into a question mark so you can:
$text = str_replace('?', '', utf8_decode($text));
Just add these lines before headers.
Accurate format of .doc/docx files will be retrieved:
if(ini_get('zlib.output_compression'))
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off');
ob_clean();
When you extract data from anywhere you should use functions with the prefix md_FUNC_NAME.
Had the same problem it helped me out.
Or you can find the code of this symbol and use regexp to delete these symbols.
You can also change the caracter set in your browser. Just for debug reasons.
Using the same charset (as suggested here) in both the database and the HTML has not worked for me... So remembering that the code is generated as HTML, I chose to use the "(HTML code) or the " (ISO Latin-1 code) in my database text where quotes were used. This solved the problem while providing me a quotation mark. It is odd to note that prior to this solution, only some of the quotation marks and apostrophes did not display correctly while others did, however, the special code did work in all instances.
I ran the "detect encoding" code after my collation change in phpmyadmin and now it comes up as Latin_1.
but here is something I came across looking a different data anomaly in my application and how I fixed it:
I just imported a table that has mixed encoding (with diamond question marks in some lines, and all were in the same column.) so here is my fix code. I used utf8_decode process that takes the undefined placeholder and assigns a plain question mark in the place of the "diamond question mark " then I used str_replace to replace the question mark with a space between quotes.
here is the
[code]
include 'dbconnectfile.php';
//// the variable $db comes from my db connect file
/// inx is my auto increment column
/// broke_column is the column I need to fix
$qwy = "select inx,broke_column from Table ";
$res = $db->query($qwy);
while ($data = $res->fetch_row()) {
for ($m=0; $m<$res->field_count; $m++) {
if ($m==0){
$id=0;
$id=$data[$m];
echo $id;
}else if ($m==1){
$fix=0;
$fix=$data[$m];
$fix = utf8_decode($fix);
$fixx =str_replace("?"," ",$fix);
echo $fixx;
////I echoed the data to the screen because I like to see something as I execute it :)
}
}
$insert= "UPDATE Table SET broke_column='".$fixx."' where inx='".$id."'";
$insresult= $db->query($insert);
echo"<br>";
}
?>
For global purposes.
Instead of converting, codifying, decodifying each text I prefer to let them as they are and instead change the server php settings.
So,
Let the diamonds
From the browser, on the view menu select
"text encoding" and find the one which let's you see your text
correctly.
Edit your php.ini and add:
default_charset = "ISO-8859-1"
or instead of ISO-8859 the one which fits your text encoding.
Go to your phpmyadmin and select your database and just increase the length/value of that table's field to 500 or 1000 it will solve your problem.