stripping bad characters in string from excel input

sevenfive

need to strip weird (im guessing binary) characters from a string pulled from mysql db which originated from excel csv.

this is particularly a problem with apostrophes, hyphens etc which display as gibberish in some browsers.

str_replace seems to be the way to go but so far no joy?

any ideas?

tomhath

Should be able to do it with a regular expression. They're worth learning, but it does take some effort and time.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php

Drakla

Or you could be a right lazy git like me, and just run it through [man]htmlspecialchars[/man] with the ENT_QUOTES flag.

sevenfive

hmm i checked out the htmlspecialchars but this doesnt handle hyphens and apostrophes which seem to be the main problems...

i cant even seem to see what the actual character looks like to replace it when i look in the page source as it just displays as "?"

any more suggestions?

Drakla

Well you'd have to use ENT_QUOTES to get it to translate apostophes, and htmlentities translatesr more characters than htmlspecialchars. But to get rid of low level binary characters, e.g to get rid of values lower than 32 and replace them with !

$badChars = array();

for ($i = 0; $i < 32; $i++)
{
   $badChars[] = chr($i);
}

$myData = str_replace($badChars, '!', $myData;

Regular expressions are better but I haven't got my mind in that gear today.

sevenfive

oh man i thought that had worked but these weird characters must be klingon or something...

thanks for the help i'll keep on keeping on...