Simple bullet point issue

Question

I am trying to catch bullet points which was given in textfield and trying to replace it with something else, because it is being shown as ? instead of • after rendering the given text to the user. I tested like this: I wrote text with bullet points in word and copy-pasted into textfield.

My vision is this:

$test = strstr($input,'•');
if($test){ echo "bullet point found!";
}

but it is not working or not catching, or • is the wrong regexp to catch the bullet points.

Answer 1

strstr is unlikely to catch • when you specify • because the former is a native character, and the latter a HTML entity.

It doesn't matter though: you should fix the underlying issue instead.

You're likely to have an encoding problem that's not limited to bullet points. Seeing a character means that you are feeding a non-UTF-8 character into UTF-8 output.

Reasons for this could be:

• A source file (where the character is stored) that is saved in the wrong encoding, eg Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8 (check the "Save As..." dialog of your IDE)

• A database connection that uses latin1 as the connection encoding (even though the tables are UTF-8)

See UTF-8 all the way through for a comprehensive list of things to look at.

Answer 2

Try • instead of • .

See Special Characters in HTML.

It's likely that the HTML isn't passing &bull, but the HTML equivilent.

If that doesn't work to find it, look into HTMLEntities() , which may realistically be the better way to go (unless maybe you're ONLY looking to deal with bullets).

EDIT: Decode the HTML with html_entity_decode() , re-encode to the user with HTMLEntities().

Answer 3

First, before checking the input make sure to encode all characters into its HTML equivalents (which • is). So like this:

$test = strstr(htmlentities($input), '•');

if($test) {
  echo "bullet point found!";
}

However, if you encode your input using htmlentities , all UTF-8 characters should be rendered fine to the user afterwards, as the storage won't need to deal with UTF-8 anymore, thus eliminating artifacts.

Also: Please make sure you are escaping user input when saving it into the database, preferably using equivalents of bound parameters as seen in PDO.