Reading special characters from .txt file - PHP

Question

I'm trying to output the content of a .txt file on a webpage using php/AJAX, which works fine for .txt files with no special characters in it. But when the .txt file contains characters such as accents on letters - è, for example, the AJAX request for the contents of the file returns null.

I think the problem originates from copying and pasting the content of the .txt file from a word document, as per a test I ran.

If you copy, for example, an apostrophe from a word document and paste it into a .txt via notepad, it appears differently to how it would if the apostrophe was typed directly into the notepad .txt file.

My client currently uploads .txt files to a certain folder on his server, and creates his content by copying and pasting from word. Is there a way around this, so that these 'copied and pasted' special characters can be read?

Example of formatting difference:

copied from word - Dave's

typed directly - Dave's

You see the difference in the apostrophe?

Answer 1

Can do htmlspecialchars() on the variable that contains the text file before echoing?

That should convert any special characters into HTML entities and should be view able on a webpage.

Answer 2

ok))

  1. do not use notepad, ever
  2. save all the files with the utf8 encoding

that's it, problem solved

Answer 3

These are called Smart Quotes. You can change them in Word options by following the guide located here . This would be the best option as it defines your intended output at the source. If this is not an option, ie there are thousands of Word files at a time, then post-processing is the way to go. This can be accomplished by looking up the HTML Entity for the characters and using a find-and-replace function. I suggest using PHP to open the text file using the str_replace() function to find and replace all occurrences of unwanted/undisplayable characters, which themselves could be defined in array or the like.