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

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

Answer 1

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.