Please tell me how to remove these characters.

[jeet]

Hi,
In a DB of mine, some characters when echoed to webpage show up like this:
—

That should be displayed as - sign.
How do I fix this problem?

If I am right, this comes up when the CharacterSet is not defined or proper output header is not set.
So I tried setting "text/html" header using php, didn't work.
Then I tried the following meta info, didn't work either.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

None of those worked.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for helping.
Bye

[Izzmo]

You could simple do the function htmlspecialchars() (http://us3.php.net/manual/en/functio...cialchars.php). Basically, what that does is any letter not a letter, like your '-' sign, would become a ASCII text in the database. Then when you want to output the info, it will come out as a '-' sign

EDIT- After rereading the problem, I noticed something. You said the characters are going in fine to the database as a '-' sign? But when you echo it, it's coming at as —? If so, I've never seen this before and is really strange. Again, I would try using the above suggestion I made and see if that works.

[Taltos]

That sounds strange. What type of field is it in the database? And what dB? MySQL? And are you just using PHP's echo to display it?

[jeet]

It's either varchar, or text fields.
To print I use either "print", or "echo" commands, depending on the amount of lines I have to print/echo...
I will try the htmlspecialchars and let you know here if it works...
Thanks

[jeet]

Tried htmlspecialchars, but it didn't work either.
Still getting the same output.
The code used was:
$st= htmlspecialchars($st, ENT_QUOTES);
echo $st;

I think it's more of a CharacterSet problem than php conversion...

[Izzmo]

Yes, it must be something with either A) Your browser B) Your webpage (not php) or C) Output settings

[jeet]

Fixed it!!!
This tag did it:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

I was previously using:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8">

Minor, but stupid mistake...
Thank you

[Taltos]

Sounds good. You could tell it was a double byte character issue because you got 2 for 1. Good job! And thanks for giving the answer too!!