Hey everyone. I have a question. I have a web scraper that grabs information from web pages that often contain characters such as vowels with umlots (I know I spelled that wrong.) The data is editable, so the characters show up unmodified in an editable text box. However, when I try to import the data into a MySQL database, the first occurrence of such a character, along with the rest of the string, is truncated from the result. Not all special characters cause the problem; vowels with macrons work, for example. I don't know if it's failing during the actual query or if the character is being filtered out at some earlier stage, but whatever the cause, it's not working. My question is, is there a way to replace these characters with their HTML equivalents? For example, the a with an umlot over the top is ä in HTML, so before the query is made, and before the filtering on the string is done, I'd like to replace that special character with its HTML representation. This allows the user to see the character while it's in its text box, yet at the same time allow it to be successfully imported into the database. I know about str_replace, but assuming it's the right function for the job, how would I go about representing these special characters in PHP so that it will understand what I'm trying to do? Thanks! James -- "Black holes are where God divided by zero." --Steven Wright
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