Question

As the title says, I’m trying to use PHP to convert the character » into it’s html entity. This is not our final solution, but before some other major changes are finished, we need this as a quick fix.

I’m trying to test out with the following code, but its not working as I’d wanted.

<form action="test.php" method="post">
    <input type="text" name="test" />
    <input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>

<?php
if (isset($_POST['test'])){
    $converted = preg_replace('/\xbb/', '&raquo;', $_POST['test']);
    echo '<div>Original: '.$_POST['test'].'</div>';
    echo '<div>Converted: '. $converted.'</div>';
}
?>

The converted seems to be correct but we are getting an extra character before the » which shows in Firefox’s view source as just a ? in a square, but I’m not sure what it actually is or why it is there.

Please can someone help? Thank you.

Answer 1

» is c2 bb in UTF-8 but bb in ISO-8859-1.

When outputting this on a page that is not UTF-8 encoded, you’ll see something like this:

» or 
�»

The chances are, the character is being posted through as UTF-8. That means the second byte is being replaced, but the first remains, so you end up with c2 followed by »

Try

$converted = preg_replace('/\xbb/u', '»', $var);

or

$converted = preg_replace('/\xc2\xbb/', '»', $var);