Cleaning up nasty characters in PHP

Got a little issue where my client is pasting in content from Word into my little text editor in a CMS.

The double quotes are coming back encoded in what looks like some form of UTF.

Any ideas if I can strip/replace these using PHP when they get displayed out of my mySQL table.

Here is the link to the page that spits out the 开发者_如何转开发dodgy characters, you can see the 'black diamonds of doom' which are causing the headaches.

http://linq.milkbarstudios.com/news_detail.php?id=3

Any suggestions would be greatly accepted!

This sounds like a bug in your code. When handling text data, you must always consider the encoding and convert back and forth as necessary. So when the browser sends you UTF-8, you must decode the string before you send it to the database (MySQL does support UTF-8 in text columns). That way, the original text will be preserved. Of course, you must do the same when you render the page for the browser (set the charset to UTF-8, make sure you actually send UTF-8, etc).

I was actually looking for PHP to replace the dodgy characters.

in the end I found this, which fixes it perfectly:

$output = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $output);