Simple bullet point issue

Question

I am trying to catch bullet points which was given in textfield and trying to replace it with something else, because it is being shown as ? instead of • after rendering the given text to the user. I tested like this: I wrote text with bullet points in word and copy-pasted into textfield.

My vision is this:

$test = strstr($input,'&bull;');
if($test){ echo "bullet point found!";
}

but it is not working or not catching, or • is the wrong regexp to catch the bullet points.

You should fix the underlying issue instead. You're likely to have an encoding problem that's not limited to bullet points. — Pekka, Feb 13 '13 at 13:37

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

strstr is unlikely to catch • when you specify • because the former is a native character, and the latter a HTML entity.

It doesn't matter though: you should fix the underlying issue instead.

You're likely to have an encoding problem that's not limited to bullet points. Seeing a � character means that you are feeding a non-UTF-8 character into UTF-8 output.

Reasons for this could be:

A source file (where the character is stored) that is saved in the wrong encoding, e.g. Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8 (check the "Save As..." dialog of your IDE)
A database connection that uses latin1 as the connection encoding (even though the tables are UTF-8)

See UTF-8 all the way through for a comprehensive list of things to look at.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '13 at 13:40

0

Try • instead of •.

See Special Characters in HTML.

It's likely that the HTML isn't passing &bull, but the HTML equivilent.

If that doesn't work to find it, look into HTMLEntities(), which may realistically be the better way to go (unless maybe you're ONLY looking to deal with bullets).

EDIT: Decode the HTML with html_entity_decode(), re-encode to the user with HTMLEntities().

answered Feb 13 '13 at 13:40

StuckAtWork

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Why use HTML entities at all? – Pekka Feb 13 '13 at 13:50
Because it was never really specified as to what he's trying to do; it's my understanding (which could be wrong) that PHP does not necessarily use the same special character codes as HTML, meaning looking for PHP codes in HTML text may not work. These functions help convert, so that the PHP strings can be manipulated. Encoding to all UTF-8 may not always be an option. – StuckAtWork Feb 13 '13 at 13:53

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 13 '13 at 13:54

First, before checking the input make sure to encode all characters into its HTML equivalents (which • is). So like this:

$test = strstr(htmlentities($input), '&bull;');

if($test) {
  echo "bullet point found!";
}

However, if you encode your input using htmlentities, all UTF-8 characters should be rendered fine to the user afterwards, as the storage won't need to deal with UTF-8 anymore, thus eliminating artifacts.

Also: Please make sure you are escaping user input when saving it into the database, preferably using equivalents of bound parameters as seen in PDO.

Simple bullet point issue

3 Answers3