Help with page encoding issue and weird characters

[coreysnyder04]

I'm trying to write a screen scraper and when I pull out the lines of the html file that I'm interested in and put them in a variable, I end up with a few extra weird characters in my string that I wasn't expecting. And I'm having a hell of a time stripping those characters out.  Its some type of encoding issue I think because the char shows up different in IE versus FF (which it shows up as a black diamond with a question mark in it).  Anyone have any ideas ?

[cags]

Probably multibyte characters from something like the UTF-8 character set. Many of the string functions in php aren't multibyte compatible. Without more details it will be difficult to actually offer any solutions.

[oni-kun]

You can use trim or rtrim to strip out any NULL characters (Very most likely the characters you're running to) at the end or beginning of your string, such as if there's padding involved. \0 = null if you want to use str_replace. Depends where they are exactly, but as well you should convert the result to unicode with utf_encode so the stream won't mess up..

[coreysnyder04]

Here check out this page:

http://www.centralohiohockey.com/screenScraper.php

 

Look at the 3rd line, after the 6. You'll see a weird char there. If you view the source in IE for that page(listed on line1) it will appear as a " ". In the php source I'm using "html_entity_decode(" on the html lines that I pull from the page.

 

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[cags]

Try putting...

 

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"); 

 

... at the top of the page.

[coreysnyder04]

Fixed. Thanks Guys.

[cags]

Excellent, don't forget to click 'Topic Solved' (bottom left corner of threads you start).