PHP output showing little black diamonds with a question mark

I'm writing a php program that pulls from a database source. Some of the varchars have quotes that are displaying as black diamonds with a question mark in them (�, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, I assume from Microsoft Word text).

How can I use php to strip these characters out?

If you see that character (� U+FFFD "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER") it usually means that the text itself is encoded in some form of single byte encoding but interpreted in one of the unicode encodings (UTF8 or UTF16).

If it were the other way around it would (usually) look something like this: ä.

Probably the original encoding is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1. You can check this without having to change your script: Browsers give you the option to re-interpret a page in a different encoding -- in Firefox use "View" -> "Character Encoding".

To make the browser use the correct encoding, add an HTTP header like this:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");

or put the encoding in a meta tag:

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

Alternatively you could try to read from the database in another encoding (UTF-8, preferably) or convert the text with iconv().

I also faced this � issue. Meanwhile I ran into three cases where it happened:

1. substr()

   I was using substr() on a UTF8 string which cut UTF8 characters, thus the cut chars could not be displayed correctly. Use mb_substr($utfstring, 0, 10, 'utf-8'); instead. Credits

2. htmlspecialchars()

   Another problem was using htmlspecialchars() on a UTF8 string. The fix is to use: htmlspecialchars($utfstring, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

3. preg_replace()

   Lastly I found out that preg_replace() can lead to problems with UTF. The code $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9ÄäÜüÖöß]/', ' ', $string); for example transformed the UTF string "F(×)=2×-3" into "F � 2� ". The fix is to use mb_ereg_replace() instead.

I hope this additional information will help to get rid of such problems.

This is a charset issue. As such, it can have gone wrong on many different levels, but most likely, the strings in your database are utf-8 encoded, and you are presenting them as iso-8859-1. Or the other way around.

The proper way to fix this problem, is to get your character-sets straight. The simplest strategy, since you're using PHP, is to use iso-8859-1 throughout your application. To do this, you must ensure that:

• All PHP source-files are saved as iso-8859-1 (Not to be confused with cp-1252).
• Your web-server is configured to serve files with charset=iso-8859-1
• Alternatively, you can override the webservers settings from within the PHP-document, using header.
• In addition, you may insert a meta-tag in you HTML, that specifies the same thing, but this isn't strictly needed.
• You may also specify the accept-charset attribute on your <form> elements.
• Database tables are defined with encoding as latin1
• The database connection between PHP to and database is set to latin1

If you already have data in your database, you should be aware that they are probably messed up already. If you are not already in production phase, just wipe it all and start over. Otherwise you'll have to do some data cleanup.

A note on meta-tags, since everybody misunderstands what they are:

When a web-server serves a file (A HTML-document), it sends some information, that isn't presented directly in the browser. This is known as HTTP-headers. One such header, is the Content-Type header, which specifies the mimetype of the file (Eg. text/html) as well as the encoding (aka charset). While most webservers will send a Content-Type header with charset info, it's optional. If it isn't present, the browser will instead interpret any meta-tags with http-equiv="Content-Type". It's important to realise that the meta-tag is only interpreted if the webserver doesn't send the header. In practice this means that it's only used if the page is saved to disk and then opened from there.

This page has a very good explanation of these things.

As mentioned in earlier answers, it is happening because your text has been written to the database in iso-8859-1 encoding, or any other format.

So you just need to convert the data to utf8 before outputting it.

$text = “string from database”;
$text = utf8_encode($text);
echo $text;

To make sure your MYSQL connection is set to UTF-8 (or latin1, depending on what you're using), you can do this to:

$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");    
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$con);

or use this to check what charset you are using:

$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");   
$charset = mysql_client_encoding($con);
echo "The current character set is: $charset\n"; 

More info here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php

Just Paste This Code In Starting to The Top of Page.

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");
?>

I chose to strip these characters out of the string by doing this -

ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none"); 
$text= mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');

Based on your description of the problem, the data in your database is almost certainly encoded as Windows-1252, and your page is almost certainly being served as ISO-8859-1. These two character sets are equivalent except that Windows-1252 has 16 extra characters which are not present in ISO-8859-1, including left and right curly quotes.

Assuming my analysis is correct, the simplest solution is to serve your page as Windows-1252. This will work because all characters that are in ISO-8859-1 are also in Windows-1252. In PHP you can change the encoding as follows:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1252');

However, you really should check what character encoding you are using in your HTML files and the contents of your database, and take care to be consistent, or convert properly where this is not possible.

Add this function to your variables utf8_encode($your variable);

Try This Please

mb_substr($description, 0, 490, "UTF-8");

This will help you. Put this inside <head> tag

<meta charset="iso-8859-1">

That can be caused by unicode or other charset mismatch. Try changing charset in your browser, in of the settings the text will look OK. Then it's question of how to convert your database contents to charset you use for displaying. (Which can actually be just adding utf-8 charset statement to your output.)

what I ended up doing in the end after I fixed my tables was to back it up and change back the settings to utf-8 then I altered my dump file so that DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci are my character set entries

now I don't have characterset issues anymore because the database and browser are utf8.

I figured out what caused it. It was the web page+browser effects on the DB. On the terminals that are linux (ubuntu+firefox) it was encoding the database in latin1 which is what the tabes are set. But on the windows 10+edge terminals, the entries were force coded into utf8. Also I noticed the windows 10 has issues staying with latin1 so I decided to bend with the wind and convert all to utf8.

I figured it was a windows 10 issue because we started using win 10 terminals. so yet again microsoft bugs causes issues. I still don't know why the encoding changes on the forms because the browser in windows 10 shows the latin1 characterset but when it goes in its utf8 encoded and I get the data anomaly. but in linux+firefox it doesn't do that.

This happened to work in my case:

$text = utf8_decode($text)

I turns the black diamond character into a question mark so you can:

$text = str_replace('?', '', utf8_decode($text));

Just add these lines before headers.

Accurate format of .doc/docx files will be retrieved:

 if(ini_get('zlib.output_compression'))
   
   ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off');
 ob_clean();

When you extract data from anywhere you should use functions with the prefix md_FUNC_NAME.

Had the same problem it helped me out.

Or you can find the code of this symbol and use regexp to delete these symbols.

You can also change the caracter set in your browser. Just for debug reasons.

Using the same charset (as suggested here) in both the database and the HTML has not worked for me... So remembering that the code is generated as HTML, I chose to use the "(HTML code) or the " (ISO Latin-1 code) in my database text where quotes were used. This solved the problem while providing me a quotation mark. It is odd to note that prior to this solution, only some of the quotation marks and apostrophes did not display correctly while others did, however, the special code did work in all instances.

I ran the "detect encoding" code after my collation change in phpmyadmin and now it comes up as Latin_1.

but here is something I came across looking a different data anomaly in my application and how I fixed it:

I just imported a table that has mixed encoding (with diamond question marks in some lines, and all were in the same column.) so here is my fix code. I used utf8_decode process that takes the undefined placeholder and assigns a plain question mark in the place of the "diamond question mark " then I used str_replace to replace the question mark with a space between quotes. here is the [code]

    include 'dbconnectfile.php';

  //// the variable $db comes from my db connect file
   /// inx is my auto increment column
   /// broke_column is the column I need to fix
      
      $qwy = "select inx,broke_column from Table ";
      $res = $db->query($qwy); 

      while ($data = $res->fetch_row()) {
      for ($m=0; $m<$res->field_count; $m++) {
           if ($m==0){ 
           $id=0;
           $id=$data[$m];
       echo $id;
           }else if ($m==1){ 
             $fix=0;
             $fix=$data[$m];


             $fix = utf8_decode($fix);
             $fixx =str_replace("?"," ",$fix);

        echo $fixx;

        ////I echoed the data to the screen because I like to see something as I execute it :)
            }
            }
         $insert= "UPDATE Table SET broke_column='".$fixx."'  where inx='".$id."'";
          $insresult= $db->query($insert);
      echo"<br>";
        }

        ?>        

For global purposes.

Instead of converting, codifying, decodifying each text I prefer to let them as they are and instead change the server php settings. So,

1. Let the diamonds

2. From the browser, on the view menu select "text encoding" and find the one which let's you see your text correctly.

3. Edit your php.ini and add:

   default_charset = "ISO-8859-1"

or instead of ISO-8859 the one which fits your text encoding.

Go to your phpmyadmin and select your database and just increase the length/value of that table's field to 500 or 1000 it will solve your problem.