PHP replacing special characters like à->a, è->e

Question

I have php document signup.php which save the content from form (in form.php document) to MySQL base. The problem arises when I want to reformat the input content. I want do

Answer 1

function correctedText($txt=''){
  $ss = str_split($txt);
    
  for($i=0; $i<count($ss); $i++){
    $asciiNumber = ord($ss[$i]);// get the ascii dec of a single character
    
    // asciiNumber will be from the DEC column showing at https://www.ascii-code.com
    
    // capital letters only checked 
    if($asciiNumber >= 192 && $asciiNumber <= 197)$ss[$i] = 'A';
    elseif($asciiNumber == 198)$ss[$i] = 'AE';
    elseif($asciiNumber == 199)$ss[$i] = 'C';
    elseif($asciiNumber >= 200 && $asciiNumber <= 203)$ss[$i] = 'E';
    elseif($asciiNumber >= 204 && $asciiNumber <= 207)$ss[$i] = 'I';
    elseif($asciiNumber == 209)$ss[$i] = 'N';
    elseif($asciiNumber >= 210 && $asciiNumber <= 214)$ss[$i] = 'O';
    elseif($asciiNumber == 216)$ss[$i] = 'O';
    elseif($asciiNumber >= 217 && $asciiNumber <= 220)$ss[$i] = 'U';
    elseif($asciiNumber == 221)$ss[$i] = 'Y';
  }
    
  $txt = implode('', $ss);
    
  return $txt;
}

Answer 2

The string $chain is in the same character encoding as the characters in the array - it's possible, even likely, that the $first_name string is in a different encoding, and so those characters don't match. You might want to try using the multibyte string functions instead.

Try mb_convert_encoding. You might also want to try using HTML_ENTITIES as the to_encoding parameter, then you don't need to worry about how the characters will get converted - it will be very predictable.

Assuming your input to this script is in UTF-8, probably not a bad place to start...

$first_name = mb_convert_encoding($first_name, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8"); 

Answer 3

CodeIgniter way:

$this->load->helper('text');

$string = convert_accented_characters($string);

This function uses a companion config file application/config/foreign_chars.php to define the to and from array for transliteration.

https://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/text_helper.html#ascii_to_entities

Answer 4

Wish I found this thread sooner. The function I made (that took me way too long) is below:

function CheckLetters($field){
    $letters = [
        0 => "a à á â ä æ ã å ā",
        1 => "c ç ć č",
        2 => "e é è ê ë ę ė ē",
        3 => "i ī į í ì ï î",
        4 => "l ł",
        5 => "n ñ ń",
        6 => "o ō ø œ õ ó ò ö ô",
        7 => "s ß ś š",
        8 => "u ū ú ù ü û",
        9 => "w ŵ",
        10 => "y ŷ ÿ",
        11 => "z ź ž ż",
    ];
    foreach ($letters as &$values){
        $newValue = substr($values, 0, 1);
        $values = substr($values, 2, strlen($values));
        $values = explode(" ", $values);
        foreach ($values as &$oldValue){
            while (strpos($field,$oldValue) !== false){
                $field = preg_replace("/" . $oldValue . '/', $newValue, $field, 1);
            }
        }
    }
    return $field;
}

Answer 5

As of PHP >= 5.4.0

$translatedString = transliterator_transliterate('Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; [\u0080-\u7fff] remove', $string);

Answer 6

There's a much easier way to do this, using iconv - from the user notes, this seems to be what you want to do: characters transliteration

// PHP.net User notes
<?php
    $string = "ʿABBĀSĀBĀD";

    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $string);
    // output: [nothing, and you get a notice]

    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//IGNORE', $string);
    // output: ABBSBD

    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $string);
    // output: ABBASABAD
    // Yay! That's what I wanted!
?>

Be very conscientious with your character encodings, so you are keeping the same encoding at all stages in the process - front end, form submission, encoding of the source files. Default encoding in PHP and in forms is ISO-8859-1, before PHP 5.4 where it changed to be UTF8 (finally!).

There's a couple of functions you can play around with for ideas. First is from CakePHP's inflector class, called slug:

public static function slug($string, $replacement = '_') {
    $quotedReplacement = preg_quote($replacement, '/');

    $merge = array(
        '/[^\s\p{Ll}\p{Lm}\p{Lo}\p{Lt}\p{Lu}\p{Nd}]/mu' => ' ',
        '/\\s+/' => $replacement,
        sprintf('/^[%s]+|[%s]+$/', $quotedReplacement, $quotedReplacement) => '',
    );

    $map = self::$_transliteration + $merge;
    return preg_replace(array_keys($map), array_values($map), $string);
}

It depends on a self::$_transliteration array which is similar to what you were doing in your question - you can see the source for inflector on github.

Another is a function I use personally, which comes from here.

function slugify($text,$strict = false) {
    $text = html_entity_decode($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    // replace non letter or digits by -
    $text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d.]+~u', '-', $text);

    // trim
    $text = trim($text, '-');
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_GB.utf8');
    // transliterate
    if (function_exists('iconv')) {
        $text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);
    }

    // lowercase
    $text = strtolower($text);
    // remove unwanted characters
    $text = preg_replace('~[^-\w.]+~', '', $text);
    if (empty($text)) {
        return 'empty_$';
    }
    if ($strict) {
        $text = str_replace(".", "_", $text);
    }
    return $text;
}

What those functions do is transliterate and create 'slugs' from arbitrary text input, which is a very very useful thing to have in your toolchest when making web apps. Hope this helps!