How do I convert Word smart quotes and em dashes in a string?

Question

I have a form with a textarea. Users enter a block of text which is stored in a database.

Occasionally a user will paste text from Word containing smart quotes or em

Answer 1

You could try mb_ convert_encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');

This assumes you want UTF-8, and convert can find reasonable replacements... if not, mb_str_replace or preg_replace them yourself.