An apostrophe is rendering as â€tm. What PHP function will display it as ' ? something_Decode?

Question

I'm grabbing some tweets and printing them out on my site and curly apostrophes are being rendered as "â€tm". This is not good. What php function should I run the string through to get these weird characters to display as something closer to '?

Answer 1

You could try to use the following function:

function htmlallentities($str){
  $res = '';
  $strlen = strlen($str);
  for($i=0; $i<$strlen; $i++){
    $byte = ord($str[$i]);
    if($byte < 128) // 1-byte char
      $res .= $str[$i];
    elseif($byte < 192); // invalid utf8
    elseif($byte < 224) // 2-byte char
      $res .= '&#'.((63&$byte)*64 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))).';';
    elseif($byte < 240) // 3-byte char
      $res .= '&#'.((15&$byte)*4096 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))*64 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))).';';
    elseif($byte < 248) // 4-byte char
      $res .= '&#'.((15&$byte)*262144 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))*4096 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))*64 + (63&ord($str[++$i]))).';';
  }
  return $res;
}

call:

$str = htmlallentities($str);

this will change utf-8-chars into htmlentities, so you can display them in different encodings.