Question

I need to replace Microsoft Word’s version of single and double quotations marks (“ ” ‘ ’) with regular quotes (‘ and “) due to an encoding issue in my application. I do not need them to be HTML entities and I cannot change my database schema.

I have two options: to use either a regular expression or an associated array.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Considering you only want to replace a few specific and well identified characters, I would go for str_replace with an array: you obviously don’t need the heavy artillery regex will bring you 😉

And if you encounter some other special characters (damn copy-paste from Microsoft Word…), you can just add them to that array whenever is necessary / whenever they are identified.

The best answer I can give to your comment is probably this link: Convert Smart Quotes with PHP

And the associated code (quoting that page):

function convert_smart_quotes($string) 
{ 
    $search = array(chr(145), 
                    chr(146), 
                    chr(147), 
                    chr(148), 
                    chr(151)); 

    $replace = array("'", 
                     "'", 
                     '"', 
                     '"', 
                     '-'); 

    return str_replace($search, $replace, $string); 
} 

(I don’t have Microsoft Word on this computer, so I can’t test by myself)

I don’t remember exactly what we used at work (I was not the one having to deal with that kind of input), but it was the same kind of stuff…