[RESOLVED] Replacing accents with their special charater equivalent

ali_p

I am working on a holiday site and many of the hotel names have French or Spanish accented characters in them. All of the names are going into my DB but i need to be able to replace for example, 'ÿ' with ÿ before it is entered into my DB. Is there a clean and efficiant way of going about this.

Thanks in advance.

Piranha

[man]htmlentities[/man] may solve your problem. But it is better to insert it into the database without doing this conversion and do the conversion when you display the data back on the website. There are two big reasons that I can think of to not do it before inserting in the database:

If your database is going to be used for anything but HTML pages in the future it will cause problems since everything is coded for HTML.
Let's say that you want the hotel names to be maximum 50 characters long. Normally you set the database field to VARCHAR(50). But when changing characters like that you have to count on the possibility to use a number of characters to use 6 spaces instead of 1. But how many characters would you add? If you set VARCHAR(100) it might not be enough, even VARCHAR(255) may be to small in some extreme cases since a hotel with 50 characters in the name may have all characters transformed, and then needs 300 characters. Ok, this is extreme, but who knows? It always become trouble if you don't make 100% sure it won't.

ali_p

They are two very good reasons. I'll take this on board.

Thanks