Problem with str_replace and single quote

xxdalexx

I have text areas that i'm trying to convert any single quote into the html code '

Here's what I have dealing with that variable.

if (isset($_POST['stat']))
{$stat = $_POST['stat'];
$stat = str_replace("\'", "&#39;", $stat);
$stat = str_replace("\n", "</li><li>", $stat);
$stat = "<ul><li>" . $stat . "</li></ul>";
}else {$stat="";}

Ive tried

$stat = str_replace("\'", "&#39;", $stat);
and
$stat = str_replace("'", "&#39;", $stat);

But I still get a mysql error showing that the single quote was not changed.
Thank you for any help you can give me.

NogDog

Not sure if it's a problem with the forum interpreting special characters or html character entities, but I cannot figure out what exactly it is you want to replace and with what. (In the post it looks like you want to replace a single quote with a single quote, which I'm sure is not your goal. 😉 )

xxdalexx

Your right, I guess you cant put html codes into the php tags. what is supposed to be there is & #39; without the space, that's what was origianlly in the middle of the function, the what your replacing with.

NogDog

Looks like that should work, assuming the character to be replaced is a "straight" quote and not a "directional" quote such as MSWord uses. If it could be a problem with those, check out this blog article of mine: http://www.charles-reace.com/blog/2008/10/15/filtering-ms-word-text/

xxdalexx

I read your article and its a straight one using the same key as quotation marks, nothing copy and pasted.

NogDog

When you say it's not working, are you sure it's not, in fact, changed to the character entity, but you're viewing the data via a browser (e.g. PHPMyAdmin) so you would only see the entity if you did a "view source"? (I figure the only silly questions are the ones you don't ask, so forgive me if you already knew that. 🙂 )

PS: If the issue is simply making sure that a quote does not screw up your SQL, just run it through mysql_real_escape_string() (or whatever is the appropriate escaping mechanism for your DBMS). Or if this is for HTML output, you could use htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() with the optional 2nd parameter being the ENT_QUOTES constant (to convert all quotes in addition to the other normally converted characters).

xxdalexx

No, the text never gets displayed on the page, just strait to the db, and im judging its not changing because i keep getting the same mysql error that starts right after the single quote.