I have been using this for a while without any problems...
$string = str_replace(array("`",chr(96)),array("'","'"), $string);
However, I just noticed that it doesn't always work for some reason... Am I missing another variation? Is there an easier way to accomplish this?
Refer to the PHP documentation for str_replace.
You need to pass the subject of the replace in order for it to work.
$string = str_replace(array("`",chr(96)),array("'","'"), $string);
Your string probably contains unicode fancy quotes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark_glyphs), and you are misinterpreting them as backticks. This can help with that: http://alanwhipple.com/2011/06/04/php-clean-encoding-issues-smart-curly-quotes-em-dashes/
Code copied in case the original site changes or goes away:
<?php
/**
* cleanEncoding deals with pesky characters like curly smart quotes and em dashes (and some other encoding related problems)
*
* @param string $text Text string to cleanup / convert
* @param string $type 'standard' for standard characters, 'reference' for decimal numerical character reference
*
* @return $text Cleaned up UTF-8 string
*/
function cleanEncoding( $text, $type='standard' ){
// determine the encoding before we touch it
$encoding = mb_detect_encoding($text, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1');
// The characters to output
if ( $type=='standard' ){
$outp_chr = array('...', "'", "'", '"', '"', '•', '-', '-'); // run of the mill standard characters
} elseif ( $type=='reference' ) {
$outp_chr = array('…', '‘', '’', '“', '”', '•', '–', '—'); // decimal numerical character references
}
// The characters to replace (purposely indented for comparison)
$utf8_chr = array("\xe2\x80\xa6", "\xe2\x80\x98", "\xe2\x80\x99", "\xe2\x80\x9c", "\xe2\x80\x9d", '\xe2\x80\xa2', "\xe2\x80\x93", "\xe2\x80\x94"); // UTF-8 hex characters
$winc_chr = array(chr(133), chr(145), chr(146), chr(147), chr(148), chr(149), chr(150), chr(151)); // ASCII characters (found in Windows-1252)
// First, replace UTF-8 characters.
$text = str_replace( $utf8_chr, $outp_chr, $text);
// Next, replace Windows-1252 characters.
$text = str_replace( $winc_chr, $outp_chr, $text);
// even if the string seems to be UTF-8, we can't trust it, so convert it to UTF-8 anyway
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', $encoding);
return $text;
}
?>