i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
without accents, cedilles, etc.

.oO(Pikkel)

>i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
>without accents, cedilles, etc.

Maybe strtr()?

Micha

"Pikkel" <pikkel> wrote in message
news:514c
> i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
> without accents, cedilles, etc.

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function...ecialchars.php

CJ Llewellyn wrote:

> "Pikkel" <pikkel> wrote in message
> news:514c
>
>>i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
>>without accents, cedilles, etc.
>> [..]
>

Thanks for you tip, but i'm not looking for html replacement but
character replacement: á --> a

Michael Fesser wrote:

> .oO(Pikkel)
>>>i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
>>without accents, cedilles, etc.
>> Maybe strtr()?
>
> Micha


i should replace all characters by myself using this function.
i was looking for a complete [accent, cedille, umlaut etc.] strip function

On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 22:08:03 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:

>i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
>without accents, cedilles, etc.

In what character set encoding? If it's a small one, e.g. iso-8859-15, just
list all the accented/non-accented pairs and run it through strtr.

If it's a Unicode variant, it's bit more of a challenge...

Andy Hassall <andy> wrote in message news:sola
> On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 22:08:03 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:
>
> >i'm looking for a way to replace special characters with characters
> >without accents, cedilles, etc.
>
> In what character set encoding? If it's a small one, e.g. iso-8859-15, just
> list all the accented/non-accented pairs and run it through strtr.
>
> If it's a Unicode variant, it's bit more of a challenge...

I'm possibly beating this subject to death, but I've yet to think of
an answer to the problem. If a user copies text from a iso-8859-15
page and then pastes it into the textarea of a form and then submits
it to a CMS which then sends it out as UTF-8 one gets garbage
characters, as one can see on this page:

http://www.krubner.com/index.php?pageId=33396

So I'm wondering if there is a way to cycle through and find quote
marks and such that are unique to iso-8859-15?????

On 6 Nov 2004 01:19:52 -0800, lkrubner (lawrence) wrote:

>I'm possibly beating this subject to death, but I've yet to think of
>an answer to the problem. If a user copies text from a iso-8859-15
>page and then pastes it into the textarea of a form and then submits
>it to a CMS which then sends it out as UTF-8 one gets garbage
>characters, as one can see on this page:
>
>[..]

There's probably a bit more to it than that, such as the encoding of the page
containing the form in the first place. If you just dump out ISO-8859-15
encoded data and pretend it's UTF-8, of course it won't work, except for the
shared ASCII (top bit not set, i.e. <= 127) representations between the two
encodings. I can't remember quite where you got to from the previous threads on
this subject though.

>So I'm wondering if there is a way to cycle through and find quote
>marks and such that are unique to iso-8859-15?????

If it's between ISO-8859-15 and UTF-8, there are no characters unique to
ISO-8859-15, since UTF-8 encodes all those characters and more. Their encoding
differs for all those with encoding >127 from ISO-8859-15 but that's a
different question. The Euro is the same character in both, but has a different
encoding in both.

But anyway, it seems to me that the simple approach is just:

(1) Present the form in UTF-8 in the first place.
(2) The user copies content from one site, in whatever encoding. Their browser
places it on the clipboard in some OS-native encoding which is hopefully
irrelevant.
(3) The user pastes it into the UTF-8 form. The browser converts the characters
into the appropriate encoding.
(4) Post the data; since the source form is UTF-8, the data is sent in UTF-8,
and you're done.
(5) You can then just reject anything that comes in as malformed UTF-8 from the
previous step.

Consider:

Two scripts, one to output iso-8859-15 and the other Codepage 1252 (with the
dread Smart Quotes and all):

<?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=iso8859-15'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Characters to copy</title>
</head>
<body>
<pre>
<?php
$n = 0;
for ($i=32; $i<255; $i++)
{
if ($i >= 127 && $i <= 159)
continue;

print htmlspecialchars(chr($i), ENT_COMPAT, 'ISO-8859-15');
if ($n++%16 == 15) print "\n";
}
?>
</pre>
</body>


<?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=Windows-1252"'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Characters to copy</title>
</head>
<body>
<pre>
<?php
$n = 0;
for ($i=32; $i<255; $i++)
{
print htmlspecialchars(chr($i), ENT_COMPAT, 'cp1252');
if ($n++%16 == 15) print "\n";
}
?>
</pre>
</body>


Then utf8form.php, put text in, print back out encoded as utf-8:

<?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Outputting</title>
</head>
<body>
<pre>
<?php
if (isset($_POST['text']))
{
print htmlspecialchars($_POST['text'], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
}
?>
</pre>

<form method="post" action="utf8form.php" accept-charset="utf-8">
<textarea name="text"></textarea>
<input type="submit">
</form>

</body>
</html>


In Firefox and IE6, this appears to work for me; copying all of the output
from the first pages, which was iso-8859-15 or Codepage 1252, and pasting into
the second page and submitting the form. The output is the same set of
characters, but UTF-8 encoded.

Also worked from other character set encodings; found a page encoded in
Shift-JIS and repeated the steps. The output looked the same to me (although I
can't read Japanese).



OK - that's the purist approach, when all the tools in the chain are
apparently handling encodings properly.

But are you after some more pragmatic approach, something like:

"The data my users send is probably iso8859-1, iso8859-15, codepage 1252, or
maybe utf-8, but it's likely been copied and mangled between applications so I
can't reliably tell which. How do I clean this data up in a reasonable way so
it can be converted to UTF8 for presentation on a UTF8 encoded page?"

If all the data has values <=127 then it's easy - that's all plain ASCII which
is a common subset of all four character sets.

You can at least rule out UTF-8 by using the functions posted in previous
threads looking for malformed UTF-8. If there's a significant number of
characters >127 and it all validates as UTF-8, then the odds of it probably
being UTF-8 increase the more characters above 127 there are, but it's still
not certain.

So you've narrowed it down to one of the three single-byte character sets.

Then the major differences are:

Codepage 1252 has printable characters in the range 128-159 (with a couple of
gaps) wheras the iso8859 encodings only have non-printable characters there. So
if there's data in this range, odds are it's Codepage 1252 - so you can convert
it to UTF-8 from there.

This range holds the angled "smart" quotes, and the em-dash, which are the
characters that cause the most trouble. So alternatively, you could convert
them to plain quotes and dashes if you wanted.

If there's no characters in that range, then you haven't ruled out 1252, but
the rest of the encoding is pretty similar between 1252, iso8859-1 and
iso8859-15

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-15 for the differences between -1
and -15, the main character worth worrying about most is the Euro (which is
somewhere else again in 1252 - in the 128-159 range I believe).

Is this any help?

Andy Hassall wrote:

[..]
> If there's no characters in that range, then you haven't ruled out 1252, but
> the rest of the encoding is pretty similar between 1252, iso8859-1 and
> iso8859-15
>
> See [..] for the differences between -1
> and -15, the main character worth worrying about most is the Euro (which is
> somewhere else again in 1252 - in the 128-159 range I believe).
>
> Is this any help?
>

It's usefull information and I'll remember this. Thank you.
It's not the answer on my question wether there is a function which
converts characters with accents, umlauts and so on, to characters without.

On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 22:54:00 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:

>It's usefull information and I'll remember this. Thank you.
>It's not the answer on my question wether there is a function which
>converts characters with accents, umlauts and so on, to characters without.

True, it's drifted a bit to answer lawrence's questions.

As far as your question goes - no, there isn't a built in function, you'd have
to write one. In order to do so, you have to be a lot more specific about the
character encodings you're using, which characters you want to convert to what,
and exactly what "and so on" means in your last sentence.

Andy Hassall wrote:
> On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 22:54:00 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:
>>
>
> True, it's drifted a bit to answer lawrence's questions.
>
> As far as your question goes - no, there isn't a built in function, you'd have
> to write one. In order to do so, you have to be a lot more specific about the
> character encodings you're using, which characters you want to convert to what,
> and exactly what "and so on" means in your last sentence.
>

I saw a few example of how to do just this on the PHP site in the user
comments. I'm not quite sure but you can bet its on str_replace or
something like that ........

Andy Hassall wrote:

> On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 22:54:00 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:
>>>It's usefull information and I'll remember this. Thank you.
>>It's not the answer on my question wether there is a function which
>>converts characters with accents, umlauts and so on, to characters without.
>> True, it's drifted a bit to answer lawrence's questions.
>
> As far as your question goes - no, there isn't a built in function, you'd have
> to write one. In order to do so, you have to be a lot more specific about the
> character encodings you're using, which characters you want to convert to what,
> and exactly what "and so on" means in your last sentence.

The pages itselves use ISO-8859-1.
But I can't be sure what's the users input. This input will be used to
name and create pages, menu's, pictures and so on.

On Sun, 07 Nov 2004 11:36:31 +0100, Pikkel <pikkel> wrote:

>Andy Hassall wrote:
>>The pages itselves use ISO-8859-1.
>But I can't be sure what's the users input. This input will be used to
>name and create pages, menu's, pictures and so on.

Right, well strtr()'s already been pointed out a couple of days ago by Michael
Fesser in this thread, so just write an array of characters you want replaced
and run it through that - ISO-8859-1 isn't big, so you can just spend a couple
of minutes writing out a list of accented characters and what you want them
transformed into.

Looking at the manual page for the function, there's an example of a function
to do this already in the user notes. http://uk.php.net/strtr

Andy Hassall <andy> wrote in message news:n4d5
[..]
> characters that cause the most trouble. So alternatively, you could convert
> them to plain quotes and dashes if you wanted.
>
> If there's no characters in that range, then you haven't ruled out 1252, but
> the rest of the encoding is pretty similar between 1252, iso8859-1 and
> iso8859-15
>
> See [..] for the differences between -1
> and -15, the main character worth worrying about most is the Euro (which is
> somewhere else again in 1252 - in the 128-159 range I believe).

Brilliant stuff. Really educational. Still, I think I'm missing
something basic about how computers read the byte stream and figure
out how many bytes each character will be. Basically, I'm wondering
what a character is. Can you point to a basic comp sci tutorial on the
subject?

And does PHP have any function other than ord() for figuring out what
set of bytes one is dealing with?

Andy Hassall <andy> wrote in message news:n4d5
> On 6 Nov 2004 01:19:52 -0800, lkrubner (lawrence) wrote:
> But are you after some more pragmatic approach, something like:
>
> "The data my users send is probably iso8859-1, iso8859-15, codepage 1252, or
> maybe utf-8, but it's likely been copied and mangled between applications so I
> can't reliably tell which. How do I clean this data up in a reasonable way so
> it can be converted to UTF8 for presentation on a UTF8 encoded page?"
>
> If all the data has values <=127 then it's easy - that's all plain ASCII which
> is a common subset of all four character sets.
>
> You can at least rule out UTF-8 by using the functions posted in previous
> threads looking for malformed UTF-8. If there's a significant number of
> characters >127 and it all validates as UTF-8, then the odds of it probably
> being UTF-8 increase the more characters above 127 there are, but it's still
> not certain.

Thinking about the pragmatics, and since I'm under considerable
pressure, I'm thinking that I might try something quick and simple and
then come back to this problem next year and deal with it more
gracefully. As near as I can see, just 6 characters are causing me
trouble:

smart quotes - both left and right
single quotes, still smart
hypens, especially em dashes and en dashes formated in word processors

I've looked at the wikipedia page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1251

It says that Windows-1251 encodes a smart quote as 9xx3. Not sure what
the x's are for. But couldn't I just loop through submitted text using
ord() to find this byte order, and then when I find it, replace it
with something ASCII?

6 or 7 or 8 tricky items in the top 3 or 4 encodings in use on the web
- a function to find them using ord() and replace them with ASCII -
that sounds like something I can do within the time constraints I
face. As much as I hope to educate myself further on the subject of
character encodings, I'm not going to be able to learn as much as I
like within the time limits I face.