I'm designing a content management system in PHP and need to be able to copy and paste information into a form and then store as a mysql record. This is from a variety of sources including word documents and web pages.
The problem I'm having is that when I copy and paste text from say another web page, some characters are being converted to an unusual entity I don't recognise, eg. if the original web page contains a left handed quotation mark the character is converted to "“"
I've checked the source code of the page I'm copying from and the left quote is represented by the correct html enitity but it arrives in my database (and the resulting source code) as "“"
My browser translates "“" as a left quote so in one sense it's not a problem, although I do want to eliminate it for the sake of good clean HTML.
Does anyone recognise these "“" character entities and is there a php function which will convert them to standard html entities?
