Filtering weird characters

[Strahan]

Hi.  I made a website to keep track of where I am in various manga.  I noticed that sometimes the title I grab looks OK when rendered on the page but in the database it's weird looking

I did a for ($x=0; $x<strlen($title); $x++) loop and dumped $x, char at $ pos and ord of char:

0 = T = 84
1 = h = 104
2 = e = 101
3 =   = 32
4 = D = 68
5 = e = 101
6 = m = 109
7 = o = 111
8 = n = 110
9 =   = 32
10 = K = 75
11 = i = 105
12 = n = 110
13 = g = 103
14 = � = 226
15 = � = 128
16 = � = 153
17 = s = 115
18 =   = 32
19 = D = 68
20 = a = 97

Is there some nifty built in function for converting that weird stuff to a regular apostrophe (and convert any other weird stuff)?  I mean, I can write a filter to look for 226/128/153 and replace with ' but I'm sure there must be a proper way to handle that stuff.  Thanks!

[kicken]

You're seeing those characters because the data is UTF-8 encoded (which is generally a good thing) but whatever tool your using is not interpreting it as UTF-8.  

If you really want to convert it, then maybe try mb_convert_encoding, however the better thing to do is fix (or replace) your tool with one that understands UTF-8 and shows the data properly.

 

[Strahan]

Ahh.  OK, sounds good.  Thanks!