PHP Remove Curly (Smart) Quotes From String Data
~ 1 min read. Published 25 Oct 2013Here's a simple function that will remove curly quotes aka smart quotes from your strings. Very useful if you enter data from MS Word files or other sources that may use weird unicode characters. Use it as an input cleaning step before saving the string data.
function remove_curly_quotes($text) {
// First, replace UTF-8 characters.
$text = str_replace(array("\xe2\x80\x98", "\xe2\x80\x99", "\xe2\x80\x9c", "\xe2\x80\x9d", "\xe2\x80\x93", "\xe2\x80\x94", "\xe2\x80\xa6"), array("'", "'", '"', '"', '-', '--',
'...'), $text);
// Next, replace their Windows-1252 equivalents.
$text = str_replace(array(chr(145), chr(146), chr(147), chr(148), chr(150), chr(151), chr(133)), array("'", "'", '"', '"', '-', '--', '...'), $text);
return $text;
}