How do I display extended ascii characters in my php code?

Question

I'm trying to decode a text that contains extended ASCII characters but when I try to convert the character I get the wrong value. Like this:

    echo "“<br>";
    echo ord("“")."<br>";
    echo chr(ord("“"))."<br>";

And this is my output:

“
226
�

The ASCII value of the character "“" is 147, not 226. And instead of the � symbol, I want to get "“" character back.

I'm using UTF-8

<meta charset="utf-8">

I have tried changing to different charsets but it didn't work.

Answer 1

1st U+201C Left Double Quotation Mark is UTF-8 byte sequence E2 80 9C (hexadecimal) i.e. decimal 226 128 156

2nd ord — Convert the first byte of a string to a value between 0 and 255

Result: ord("“") returns 226…

Instead of ord and chr pair, use mb_ord and its complement mb_chr, e.g. as follows:

<?php
echo "“<br>";
echo mb_ord("“")."<br>";
echo mb_chr(mb_ord("“"))."<br>";
?>

Result: .\SO\74045685.php

“
8220
“

Edit you can get Windows-1251 code (147) for character “ (U+201C, Left Double Quotation Mark) as follows:

echo ord(mb_convert_encoding("“","Windows-1251","UTF-8"));  //147