Getting ’ instead of an apostrophe(') in PHP

Question

I've tried converting the text to or from utf8, which didn't seem to help.

I'm getting:

"It’s Getting the Best of Me"

It should be:

"It’s Getting the Best of Me"

I'm getting this data from this url.

Answer 1

To convert to HTML entities:

<?php
  echo mb_convert_encoding(
    file_get_contents('http://www.tvrage.com/quickinfo.php?show=Surviver&ep=20x02&exact=0'),
    "HTML-ENTITIES",
    "UTF-8"
  );
?>

See docs for mb_convert_encoding for more encoding options.

Answer 2

Make sure your html header specifies utf8

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

That usually does the trick for me (obviously if the content IS utf8).

You don't need to convert to html entities if you set the content-type.

Answer 3

Your content is fine; the problem is with the headers the server is sending:

Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:502
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:45:32 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=1, max=25
Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Content-Type should be set to Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8, because this page is not HTML and uses the utf-8 encoding. Chromium on Mac guesses ISO-8859-1 and displays the characters you're describing.

If you are not in control of the site, specify the encoding as UTF-8 to whatever function you use to retrieve the content. I'm not familiar enough with PHP to know how exactly.

Answer 4

I know the question was answered but setting meta tag didn't help in my case and selected answer was not clear enough, so I wanted to provide simpler answer.

So to keep it simple, store string into a variable and process that like this

$TVrageGiberish = "It’s Getting the Best of Me";

$notGiberish = mb_convert_encoding($TVrageGiberish, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

echo $notGiberish;

Which should return what you wanted It’s Getting the Best of Me

If you are parsing something, you can perform conversion while assigning values to a variable like this, where $TVrage is array with all the values, XML in this example from a feed that has tag "Title" which may contain special characters such as ‘ or ’.

$cleanedTitle = mb_convert_encoding($TVrage->title, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

Answer 5

If you're here because you're experiencing issues with junk characters in your WordPress site, try this:

1. Open wp-config.php

2. Comment out define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8') and define('DB_COLLATE', '')

   /** MySQL hostname */
   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
   
   /** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
   //define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
   
   /** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
   //define('DB_COLLATE', '');
   

Answer 6

Just try this

if $text contains strange charaters do this:

$mytext = mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

and you are done..

Answer 7

We had success going the other direction using this:

mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", "ISO-8859-1");

Answer 8

It sounds like you're using standard string functions on a UTF8 characters (’) that doesn't exist in ISO 8859-1. Check that you are using Unicode compatible PHP settings and functions. See also the multibyte string functions.

Answer 9

if all seems not to work, this could be your best solution.

<?php
$content="It’s Getting the Best of Me";
$content = str_replace("’", "&#39;", $content);
echo $content;
?>

==or==

<?php
$content="It’s Getting the Best of Me";
$content = str_replace("’", "'", $content);
echo $content;
?>

Answer 10

try this :

html_entity_decode(mb_convert_encoding(stripslashes($text), "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8'))

Answer 11

For fopen and file_put_contents, this will work:

str_replace("’", "'", htmlspecialchars_decode(mb_convert_encoding($string_to_be_fixed, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8")));

Answer 12

You Should check encode encoding origin then try to convert to correct encode type.

In my case, I read csv files then import to db. Some files displays well some not. I check encoding and see that file with encoding ASCII displays well, other file with UTF-8 is broken. So I use following code to convert encoding:

if(mb_detect_encoding($content) == 'UTF-8') {
    $content = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $content);
    file_put_contents($file_path, $content);
} else {
    $content = mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
    file_put_contents($file_path, $content);
}

After convert I push the content to file then process import to DB, now it displays well in front-end

Answer 13

If none of the above solutions work:

In my case I noticed that the single quote was a different style of single quote. Instead of ' my data had a ’. Notice the difference in the single quote? So I simply wrote a str_replace to replace it and it fixed the problem. Probably not the most elegant solution but it got the job done.

$string= str_replace("’","'",$string);

Answer 14

use this

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8_unicode_ci" />

instead of this

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Answer 15

I looked at the link, and it looks like UTF-8 to me. i.e., in Firefox, if you pick View, Character Encoding, UTF-8, it will appear correctly.

So, you just need to figure out how to get your PHP code to process that as UTF-8. Good luck!

Answer 16

If nothing works try this mb_convert_encoding($elem->textContent, 'UTF-8', 'utf8mb4');