Dealing with smart/curly quotes

shacker

Users will be pasting text from MS Word documents into forms in an app I'm building. I'm seeing inconsistent behavior in the ways different browsers are handling pasted in smart/curly quotes (i.e. what gets inserted in the database is different depending on whether the user is using Safari or Explorer -- haven't tried other browsers yet).

What's the best way to convert smart quotes (both single and double) to normal quotes during processing?

Thanks,
Scot

stolzyboy

you could use str_replace on the fields before you input them into the db, like

<?
$var  = "this is where the “quotes” are around the word";
$var = str_replace("“", $var);
$var = str_replace("”", $var);
echo $var;
?>

something like that for example

HalfaBee

There is also this funcion

$escaped = addcslashes($not_escaped, "\"”'");

HalfaBee

Paulus_Magnus

You may also want to consider swapping the long hyphen bar that Word uses rather than the standard ASCII hyphen.

I guess with 3 replacements you're into a preg_replace swapping either smart quote for a normal quote and swapping the long hyphen for the normal one.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

shacker

stolzyboy, str_replace does not seem to be picking up the smart quotes in your example (I added a replace string to your example for testing). For example:

$foo = str_replace ("?" , "bar", $foo );
echo $foo;

$foo is not modified. Any ideas? (for some reason Safari is changing the smart quote into ?, but it's present correctly in my code.)

Halfabee, thanks, but I need the smart quotes replaced, rather than escaped.

stolzyboy

oops, sorry, i missed the parameter that tells you what to replace with, this works, i tested it this time

<? 
$var  = "this is where the “quotes” are around the word"; 
$var = str_replace("“", "\"", $var); 
$var = str_replace("”", "\"", $var); 
echo $var; 
?>

shacker

stolzyboy -

Thanks for that, works great. The problem got a bit stranger after I used something based on this to spit a preview to a separate page, then put results into a database. In the database, the quotes had become #8220; and #8221; , though I'm not sure where that conversion happened (I sure didn't do it in my code). Smart dashes were 8211. The final solution looked like this:

$experience = str_replace("&amp;#8220;", "\"", $experience);

Repeat for right quote and smart dash, for each affected variable.

Cheers!