PHP: How to convert string to WINDOWS-1252 entities/characters?

Question

I have the following string:

LONDON — Britain’s unemployment rate held steady in the three months through January, reinforcing the Bank of England’s case for keeping interest rates at a record low.

If I use something like htmlentities I get the following string:

LONDON — Britain’s unemployment rate held steady in the three months through January, reinforcing the Bank of England’s case for keeping interest rates at a record low.

However I want to get WINDOWS-1252 entities instead such as:

LONDON — Britain’s unemployment rate held steady in the three months through January, reinforcing the Bank of England’s case for keeping interest rates at a record low.

I've tried using different functions such as mb_convert_encoding, iconv, get_html_translation_table but I'm unable to find a way to do this.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Basically the conversion is the &#ASCII; in format. So using the ascii value of those's special characters, you can easily implement it in preg_replace_callback function. Take a look at the following example:

$text = <<<EOT
LONDON — Britain’s unemployment rate held steady in the three months through January, reinforcing the Bank of England’s case for keeping interest rates at a record low.
EOT;

$text = preg_replace_callback(
    "/([—’])/",   // <-- place characters inside the [] if you need to change
    function ($m){ return "&#".ord($m[1]).";"; },
    $text
);

print "$text\n";

I have just used two(—’) characters here inside []. if you need more, just add those one by one.