Dealing with Word special characters

[Scot Hacker]

I have a database that has been populated with content pasted out of MS
Word, and is full of special characters -- em dashes, curly quotes, curly
apostrophes, etc. Now I'm generating plain text email summaries out of the
database and of course those special chars appear as garbage chars in the
emails.

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

Thanks,
Scot

[usenet]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 19:00:33 GMT, Scot Hacker <sh*****@birdho use.org> wrote:

I have a database that has been populated with content pasted out of MS
Word, and is full of special characters -- em dashes, curly quotes, curly
apostrophes, etc. Now I'm generating plain text email summaries out of the
database and of course those special chars appear as garbage chars in the
emails.

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

You might want to check out the wordDocumentHan dler class.
http://psbweb.mirrors.phpclasses.org...kage/1352.html

[Scot Hacker]

On 11/24/04 11:22 AM, in article 8n************* *************** ****@4ax.com,
"us****@isotope REEMOOVEmedia.c om" <us****@isotope REEMOOVEmedia.c om> wrote:

You might want to check out the wordDocumentHan dler class.
http://psbweb.mirrors.phpclasses.org...kage/1352.html

Hmm... That sounded promising, but then I found this comment in the header:

// Of course, you need MsWord installed on the server, so Windows OS.

Not an option here. Also, that class seems to want an actual Word doc as
input, and outputs text or html files. All I want to do is examine the
contents of a variable for typical Word special characters and transform
them (IOTW I don't need document I/O, just a quick filter to scan text for
the funky chars).

Thanks,
Scot

[Pedro Graca]

Scot Hacker wrote:

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

Have a look at
http://www.ph.net/htmlentities
--
Mail sent to my "From:" address is publicly readable at http://www.dodgeit.com/
== ** ## !! !! ## ** ==
TEXT-ONLY mail to the complete "Reply-To:" address ("My Name" <my@address>) may
bypass the spam filter. I will answer all pertinent mails from a valid address.

[Pedro Graca]

Pedro Graca wrote:

Scot Hacker wrote:

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

Have a look at
http://www.ph.net/htmlentities

Of course I meant
http://www.php.net/htmlentities
example, written on the command-line

php$ php -r 'echo htmlentities("J oão Graça"), "\n";'
Jo&atilde;o Gra&ccedil;a

php$

--
Mail to my "From:" address is readable by all at http://www.dodgeit.com/
== ** ## !! ------------------------------------------------ !! ## ** ==
TEXT-ONLY mail to the whole "Reply-To:" address ("My Name" <my@address>)
may bypass my spam filter. If it does, I may reply from another address!

[Michael Fesser]

.oO(Pedro Graca)

Scot Hacker wrote:

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

Have a look at
http://www.ph.net/htmlentities

The OP wants to print plain text, no HTML.

Micha

[Sacs]

Scot Hacker wrote:

I have a database that has been populated with content pasted out of MS
Word, and is full of special characters -- em dashes, curly quotes, curly
apostrophes, etc. Now I'm generating plain text email summaries out of the
database and of course those special chars appear as garbage chars in the
emails.

How can I filter the extracted text and transform these characters into
plain text equivalents? Is there a builtin function for this, external class
available, or do I need to try and hack it out from scratch?

Thanks,
Scot

I've managed to do just that using a call to antiword.
http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

$cmd = "/usr/local/bin/antiword -t " . $filename . " > " . $txt_file ;
system($cmd);
$document = mysql_real_esca pe_string(htmle ntities("<pre>" .
fread(fopen($tx t_file, "r"), filesize($txt_f ile)) . "</pre>"));
then store $document in the database. Gets a bit ugly at times, but
works :-)

Sacs