Topic: [SOLVED] replacing characters in a string

[nbarone]

I have built a CMS to change content on a webpage, however, 90% of the content is givin to me in MS .docx format, and the people who write the content use lots of special characters.
Here is what I have to switch them over:

Code: [Select]

$content = $_REQUEST['pg_u_content'];
$content = ereg_replace("’","'",$content);
$content = ereg_replace("”","\"",$content);
$content = ereg_replace("“","\"",$content);
$content = ereg_replace("–","-",$content);
$content = ereg_replace("é","e",$content);
is there an easier way? It seems that their would be...

[947740]

http://us2.php.net/str_replace

[nbarone]

http://us2.php.net/str_replace

Thanks, this is what I have now:

Code: [Select]

$content = $_REQUEST['pg_u_content'];
$c_find = array("’","”","“","–","é");
$c_replace = array("'","\"","\"","-","é");
$content = str_replace($c_find,$c_replace,$content);
However, is this the most efficient way to handle this?

[947740]

You did not ask for a more efficient way, but I would imagine it would be once you get a lot of characters.  Having to run one function several times compared to running one function once...

As to your initial question, it would be easier (to me, at least) just to have arrays, because you just tack on characters to the end of each array, instead of creating a whole new line of code.

[Mark Baker]

Or it might be better to use htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars()

[nbarone]

You did not ask for a more efficient way, but I would imagine it would be once you get a lot of characters.  Having to run one function several times compared to running one function once...

As to your initial question, it would be easier (to me, at least) just to have arrays, because you just tack on characters to the end of each array, instead of creating a whole new line of code.

Thank you, by "most efficient" way I meant was the something similar to htmlentities that converted special characters to HTML-readable characters. This will work fine, since this CMS will only be used periodically.

Thank you very much for the help.

[nbarone]

Or it might be better to use htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars()

Thanks, but neither of those do what I am trying to accomplish.