Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentities function

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  • BG Mahesh
    #1

    Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentities function

    hi

    We are using the normal html controls (textarea) in the posting form.
    The form page has the utf-8 character set.

    Users are copying the text from MS Word or Openoffice doc etc.

    Our PHP code is handling the conversion of RTF text characters and utf
    characters into HTML entities (e.g. & is being converted to & by
    the inbuilt php function 'htmlentities')

    However many common characters/symbols are not being converted
    properly. When I say common, even the ones like '-' (hyphen) are not
    being converted by htmlentities. It gets converted to junk characters
    like ?? or &((&^.

    Is there any fix for this problem?

    regards,

    Mahesh
    Tags: None
    • Sjoerd
      #2
      Re: Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentitiesfun ction

      On Aug 14, 11:24 am, BG Mahesh <mah...@mahesh. comwrote:
      The form page has the utf-8 character set.
      However many common characters/symbols are not being converted
      properly. When I say common, even the ones like '-' (hyphen) are not
      being converted by htmlentities. It gets converted to junk characters
      like ?? or &((&^.
      Hyphen does not need to be converted by htmlentities. It can be in
      HTML just like any letter or number.

      However, the source of your problem is probably that you are reading
      UTF8 data but not outputting it as UTF8. The hyphen may be some
      special hyphen which occupies two bytes. If you print this in ASCII or
      Latin-1 or anything other than UTF8, something else than a hyphen will
      show.

        Comment

        • Paul Lautman
          #3
          Re: Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentities function

          BG Mahesh wrote:
          hi
          >
          We are using the normal html controls (textarea) in the posting form.
          The form page has the utf-8 character set.
          >
          Users are copying the text from MS Word or Openoffice doc etc.
          >
          Our PHP code is handling the conversion of RTF text characters and utf
          characters into HTML entities (e.g. & is being converted to &amp; by
          the inbuilt php function 'htmlentities')
          >
          However many common characters/symbols are not being converted
          properly. When I say common, even the ones like '-' (hyphen) are not
          being converted by htmlentities. It gets converted to junk characters
          like ?? or &((&^.
          >
          Is there any fix for this problem?
          >
          regards,
          >
          Mahesh
          MS Word has a habit of converting a pair of hyphens to a dash (see
          AutoCorrect options, tag AutoFormat) and chaning 3 full stops to an elipsis
          (see AutoCorrect options, tag AutoCorrect).
          It is these that are causing your problems due to the reason that Sjoerd
          explains.


            Comment

            • I V
              #4
              Re: Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentitiesfun ction

              On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:24:31 -0700, BG Mahesh wrote:
              We are using the normal html controls (textarea) in the posting form.
              The form page has the utf-8 character set.
              >
              Users are copying the text from MS Word or Openoffice doc etc.
              >
              Our PHP code is handling the conversion of RTF text characters and utf
              characters into HTML entities (e.g. & is being converted to &amp; by the
              inbuilt php function 'htmlentities')
              >
              However many common characters/symbols are not being converted properly.
              When I say common, even the ones like '-' (hyphen) are not being
              converted by htmlentities. It gets converted to junk characters like ??
              or &((&^.
              htmlentities assumes a ISO-8859-1 character set by default; so, it will
              mis-interpret the UTF-8 characters supplied by your users. You could
              specify the character set explicitly with

              htmlentities($s ome_utf8_string , ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')

              or you could use htmlspecialchar s, which only converts ampersands and
              quote marks, and should pass your UTF-8 characters through unchanged.

                Comment

                • BG Mahesh
                  #5
                  Re: Having trouble converting few characters using htmlentitiesfun ction

                  On Aug 14, 9:30 pm, I V <ivle...@gmail. comwrote:
                  On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:24:31 -0700, BG Mahesh wrote:
                  We are using the normal html controls (textarea) in the posting form.
                  The form page has the utf-8 character set.
                  >
                  Users are copying the text from MS Word or Openoffice doc etc.
                  >
                  Our PHP code is handling the conversion of RTF text characters and utf
                  characters into HTML entities (e.g. & is being converted to &amp; by the
                  inbuilt php function 'htmlentities')
                  >
                  However many common characters/symbols are not being converted properly..
                  When I say common, even the ones like '-' (hyphen) are not being
                  converted by htmlentities. It gets converted to junk characters like ??
                  or &((&^.
                  >
                  htmlentities assumes a ISO-8859-1 character set by default; so, it will
                  mis-interpret the UTF-8 characters supplied by your users. You could
                  specify the character set explicitly with
                  >
                  htmlentities($s ome_utf8_string , ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')
                  >
                  or you could use htmlspecialchar s, which only converts ampersands and
                  quote marks, and should pass your UTF-8 characters through unchanged.

                  Thank you everybody. It works now.

                    Comment

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