Getting ’ instead of an apostrophe(') in PHP

Question

I\'ve tried converting the text to or from utf8, which didn\'t seem to help.

I\'m getting:

\"It’s Getting the Best of Me\"

It sho

Answer 1

use this

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8_unicode_ci" />

instead of this

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Answer 2

I know the question was answered but setting meta tag didn't help in my case and selected answer was not clear enough, so I wanted to provide simpler answer.

So to keep it simple, store string into a variable and process that like this

$TVrageGiberish = "It’s Getting the Best of Me";

$notGiberish = mb_convert_encoding($TVrageGiberish, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

echo $notGiberish;

Which should return what you wanted It’s Getting the Best of Me

If you are parsing something, you can perform conversion while assigning values to a variable like this, where $TVrage is array with all the values, XML in this example from a feed that has tag "Title" which may contain special characters such as ‘ or ’.

$cleanedTitle = mb_convert_encoding($TVrage->title, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

Answer 3

Your content is fine; the problem is with the headers the server is sending:

Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:502
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:45:32 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=1, max=25
Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Content-Type should be set to Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8, because this page is not HTML and uses the utf-8 encoding. Chromium on Mac guesses ISO-8859-1 and displays the characters you're describing.

If you are not in control of the site, specify the encoding as UTF-8 to whatever function you use to retrieve the content. I'm not familiar enough with PHP to know how exactly.

Answer 4

Just try this

if $text contains strange charaters do this:

$mytext = mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

and you are done..

Answer 5

if all seems not to work, this could be your best solution.

<?php
$content="It’s Getting the Best of Me";
$content = str_replace("’", "&#39;", $content);
echo $content;
?>

==or==

<?php
$content="It’s Getting the Best of Me";
$content = str_replace("’", "'", $content);
echo $content;
?>

Answer 6

For fopen and file_put_contents, this will work:

str_replace("’", "'", htmlspecialchars_decode(mb_convert_encoding($string_to_be_fixed, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8")));