php if string contains any character from an array

Question

I have an xml document that gets loaded onto a page. Sometimes there are specific characters that cannot be parsed and shows this symbol in place of what should be there: â€“

Sometimes the character varies from a hyphen, to an apostrophe, to even a double quote.

What I'd like to do is, create an array:

$invalidCharacters = array(" – ", "’", "&");

and if the string contains any of those characters, replace them with their HTML/ASCII equivalent. like this: " – ", "'", and &.

I know that I can do a str_replace() on some items, but, is there a simple way to have it go trough a loop and look for the specific characters, replacing each as it goes?

str_replace with arrays just performs all the replacements sequentially. — Arnaud
– Arnaud, Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 20:33
Getting â€“ sounds more like a character set issue than anything, e.g. dumping utf8 text into an iso8859 environment. — Marc B
– Marc B, Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 20:40

BarbulaM1 · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-02 20:38:15Z

2

Using htmlspecialchars should work for you.

http://docs.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php

answered Apr 2, 2014 at 20:38

BarbulaM1

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2 Comments

Mark Bogner Over a year ago

So, wait... all I would have to do is something like this? $MyString = htmlspecialchars($myotherstring); And that's it??

BarbulaM1 Over a year ago

Yes, you could add a flag for XML. It would look like $MyString = htmlspecialchars($myotherstring, ENT_XML1);

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