How to Reliably Encode Symbols Pasted from MS Word

[jalperin]

I need to be able to encode into the appropriate html entities arbitrary text (pasted from Microsoft Word) which might include unusual characters and symbols. Here's an example string:
“Smart Double Quotes” & Smart Quote’s Em—dash En–Dash© ® ™ á é ü € £

Using the php function htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES) doesn't encode everything. (In the example above, the em dash, en dash, trademark symbol and Euro symbol remain un-encoded.) I tried using this variant form: htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"), but it produced a completely blank string.

Any suggestions?

[NogDog]

If the [man]mbstring[/man] extension is enabled, try this:

echo htmlentities(mb_convert_encoding($text, 'ISO-8859-1'));

[jalperin]

Doesn't work. When applied to my test string returns the following:

“Smart Double Quotes” & Smart Quote’s Em—dash En–Dash© ® ™ á é ü € £

(Note that the smart single and double quotes, em dash, en dash, trademark and Euro characters are still unconverted.)

[NogDog]

You could take a look at [man]get_html_translation_table/man and in particular the users' notes, and come up with your own enhanced replacement function to replace htmlentities().