Question

I’m not sure it’s even possible, but something tells me it may be. I’d appreciate expert guidance.

My WordPress-based website gets bits of dynamic content from this other site (“this day in aviation” widget):

http://www.youngeagles.com/factzone/thisday.asp

I embed that data into my site using this bit of code:

<div id="this_day_in_history">
<h3>This Day in Aviation History</h3>

<script src="http://www.youngeagles.com/thisday/absolutecr.asp?z=1" type="text/javascript"></script>

</div>

On the original site, all the characters display perfectly fine, but when they are displayed on my site, some of the quotes and a few French and Spanish characters are replaced with <?>.

Is there a magic line of code that would allow me to fix the look of the characters on my site?

Preferably with jQuery or JavaScript, or maybe there’s a PHP solution?

I would be grateful for your suggestions!

EDIT: the initial solution was offered as answer to this question by Adam MacDonald, but the snippet of code he generously composed needed a couple of further adjustments for my purposes. The final solution was offered by Phoenix in a separate thread: A bit of PHP code wipes out WordPress site

Answer 1

I find using iconv works the best in php .. something like:

iconv(“UTF-8”, “ISO-8859-1//IGNORE//TRANSLIT”, $str)

It attempts to match the character to the best of its ability, and if not, drops it

Also, utf8_encode/decode sometimes works fine.

EDIT:

perhaps something like this …

    <?php
    $contents=file_get_contents('http://www.youngeagles.com/thisday/absolutecr.asp?z=1');
    $convertedcontents=iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", $contents);
    echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">".$convertedcontents."</script>";
    ?>

EDIT 2:
just in case you want to see the changes in place of your current code:

    <div id="this_day_in_history">
    <h3>This Day in Aviation History</h3>
    <?php
    $contents=file_get_contents('http://www.youngeagles.com/thisday/absolutecr.asp?z=1');
    $convertedcontents=iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE//TRANSLIT", $contents);
    echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">".$convertedcontents."</script>";
    ?>
    </div>