Question

Ok so I simply call from mysql some text, and then I run it through nl2br to preserve linebreaks and all its symbols and what not.

code looks like this on both pages – <? echo nl2br($row[text]); ?>

now on one page it preseves line breaks quotations hyphens, everything. and on the other preseves line breaks, but has symbols within it like instaed of hyphons or quotations.

For example – Jenny and Jonny “Big Wave†video

Any help would be great

Answer 1

I think you may be hitting an issue with HTML entities:

<? echo nl2br(htmlentities($row[text])); ?>

This probably won’t resolve the issue as you probably have a character encoding issue too. Make sure your database field is storing data as UTF-8, then add the following line immediately after your mysql_select_db() line:

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

Once that’s done, outputting the text should work something like this:

<? echo nl2br(htmlentities($row[text],ENT_COMPAT,'UTF-8')); ?>

An easier fix might be to ensure the “funny” quotations in the DB are replaced with “normal” quotations – “ and ” versus ” (you’ll hit the same with single quotes/apostrophes and em dashes/en dashes/etc copied from Word).