Convert weird characters to their html entity equivalent

Recently I had to import some html from another site that was using a different encoding than UTF-8. The strange thing was that I could not find a good article on converting weird looking characters to their html equivalent and on top of this none of the php encoding functions worked for me.

After a long search I found this article that put me on the right track.

Using the above I started creating my own code to map the weird characters that broke the site:

function cleanImportedText($body){
 
    $replace = array("\x95","\x99");
    $replaceWith = array("•","™");
    
    $body = str_replace($replace, $replaceWith, $body );
    
    return $body;
}

The example above does the encoding for • and ™ from hexa. You can use it as starting point for your own mapping of "strange" characters.

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