my dreaded french apostrophe

[bobo]

hello

(php and oracle environment)

anybody know how to handle french apostrophe character.

you will find an example of the caracter I mean here:
http://wapedia.mobi/enwiktionary/apostrophe
-scroll about half way down the page, look for the section "Punctuation"
-it's the second one (most right) versions they show of the 2 versions under "apostrophe".

My french entourage, alot of time copy and paste from Microsoft Word into a textarea box, then I insert into oracle database. It doesn't understand that char and turns it into an upside down question mark (¿ ). I tried to use find and replace with php but it doesn't work. I will probably need to refer to it by it's ascii definition, but not sure on how to do that. I even tried to trick it into doing the "ereg" replace of the "¿ " back into a normal apostrophe but that doesn't seem to work either.

[bobo]

ok I found a better site for it
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...2019/index.htm

now at least I know the encodings' name for it, so how to I grab this when it's comming in raw, and tell it to convert to a normal apostrophe BEFORE I insert into the database?

[PeejAvery]

The only reason it won't work naturally is if the page's encoding or the database/table/column encoding is not compliant. Make sure all 4 are UTF-8 and you won't have a problem.

[bobo]

it's just that I don't always have control over the database/table/column format.

could I not somehow do something like this:
$textarea = (whatever php fuctions that converts into a html entity)
then use: ereg_replace('’", "whateverItIS", $textarea)

($textarea could be a long paragraph)

let me guess... if it's not UTF 8 it already doesn't know what the hex encoding is or will give me the hex of the wrongly parsed character?

[PeejAvery]

let me guess... if it's not UTF 8 it already doesn't know what the hex encoding is or will give me the hex of the wrongly parsed character?

Correct.