mysql_real_escape_string and apostrophe problem

Question

so I've been using mysql_real_escape_string to insert data into my database...but then when I do that it replaces all apostrophes with the symbol ’

so instead of display it's, it's displaying it’s.......

is there a way to reconvert those ’'s into apostrophes when I read back from the database?

Answer 1

This is some character encoding issue in some way.

Because in UTF-8, ’ (U+2019) is encoded with 0xE28099. And that represents the characters â (0xE2), € (0x80), and ™ (0x99) in Windows-1252.

So it seems that you just forgot to specify your output character encoding properly so that the browser uses its default character encoding Windows-1252 instead.

Answer 2

Apply mysql_set_charset to UTF-8 in your PHP.

Answer 3

Ensure your database and application are using the same character encoding.

In binary, ' is identical in value to ’, so you need to ensure the encoding is set the same.

In your PHP application, you can specify this with the following two lines.

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

This sets your application to use UTF-8 character set, which you must ensure matches your database's collation, then your problem will go away.

You can programatically change the database character set with the mysql_set_charset function.