PHP, FileMaker & Special Characters

[spacemonkey]

I am trying to pass the contents of a user completed text field in FileMaker Pro 9 (- the FileMaker database is being served from Macosx 10.5.5 as is the PHP server (- same machine)) the (using Open URL script step) to a variable in the receiving send_message.php file. The text is transmitted and received, however, the user generated text includes 'smart quotes' (“ and ”) and consequently appear as “ and †respectively (-note the hidden character after the †for the ”).

 

I have tried using the following code to no avail:

 

$oldmsgString = "“";
$newmsgString = "\"";
$test_message =  stripslashes($_GET['message']);
$new_message =  str_replace($oldmsgString, $newmsgString, $test_message);

 

Interestingly when I pasted the code directly from the send_message.php file into this post it appeared as:

 

$oldmsgString = "“";
$newmsgString = "\"";
$test_message =  stripslashes($_GET['message']);
$new_message =  str_replace($oldmsgString, $newmsgString, $test_message);

 

n.B. the content of the $oldmsgString.

 

It would appear to be an issue to do with the text encoding in FileMaker and PHP but I have no idea how to resolve this. Is there a way I can convert the text received from the FileMaker text encoding to that expected by PHP?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[JonnoTheDev]

This is a real pain in the arse. Usually get this when people copy and paste text directly from microsoft word into a html text editor that saves into a database table. Never really found a solution, tested changing character sets and all kinds but nothing works completely.

 

The problem using str_replace with a string like "“" is that php doesn't actually see the characters in that fashion. They only come out like that when printed to the screen.

 

Hopefully somebody has the answer