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

If you were looking to escape these characters for the web while preserving their appearance, so your strings will appear like this: “It’s nice!” rather than "It's boring"...

You can do this by using your own custom htmlEncode function in place of PHP's htmlentities():

$trans_tbl = false;

function htmlEncode($text) {

  global $trans_tbl;

  // create translation table once
  if(!$trans_tbl) {
    // start with the default set of conversions and add more.

    $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES); 

    $trans_tbl[chr(130)] = '‚';    // Single Low-9 Quotation Mark
    $trans_tbl[chr(131)] = 'ƒ';    // Latin Small Letter F With Hook
    $trans_tbl[chr(132)] = '„';    // Double Low-9 Quotation Mark
    $trans_tbl[chr(133)] = '…';    // Horizontal Ellipsis
    $trans_tbl[chr(134)] = '†';    // Dagger
    $trans_tbl[chr(135)] = '‡';    // Double Dagger
    $trans_tbl[chr(136)] = 'ˆ';    // Modifier Letter Circumflex Accent
    $trans_tbl[chr(137)] = '‰';    // Per Mille Sign
    $trans_tbl[chr(138)] = 'Š';    // Latin Capital Letter S With Caron
    $trans_tbl[chr(139)] = '‹';    // Single Left-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark
    $trans_tbl[chr(140)] = 'Œ';    // Latin Capital Ligature OE

    // smart single/ double quotes (from MS)
    $trans_tbl[chr(145)] = '‘'; 
    $trans_tbl[chr(146)] = '’'; 
    $trans_tbl[chr(147)] = '“'; 
    $trans_tbl[chr(148)] = '”'; 

    $trans_tbl[chr(149)] = '•';    // Bullet
    $trans_tbl[chr(150)] = '–';    // En Dash
    $trans_tbl[chr(151)] = '—';    // Em Dash
    $trans_tbl[chr(152)] = '˜';    // Small Tilde
    $trans_tbl[chr(153)] = '™';    // Trade Mark Sign
    $trans_tbl[chr(154)] = 'š';    // Latin Small Letter S With Caron
    $trans_tbl[chr(155)] = '›';    // Single Right-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark
    $trans_tbl[chr(156)] = 'œ';    // Latin Small Ligature OE
    $trans_tbl[chr(159)] = 'Ÿ';    // Latin Capital Letter Y With Diaeresis

    ksort($trans_tbl);
  }

  // escape HTML      
  return strtr($text, $trans_tbl); 
}