Deleting MS Word 'fancy' characters from xml feed

ms word characters are destroying my feeds

[zulubanshee]

People are writing their info in MS Word and copy and pasting it into the textarea field and uploading to the database. I process feeds from this data. Problem is fancy quotes, ellipses, hyphens and a few other things are breaking the feeds.

Im using PHP. Is there a regular expression that will test for all these characters? I don't need to translate them. Im satisfied with deleting them.

[httpwebwitch]

use htmlentities($string) [ca3.php.net]

[zulubanshee]

thanks ill give it a try.

[zulubanshee]

that doesnt seem to have worked :(

[httpwebwitch]

So... you're escaping the CDATA contents of your nodes with htmlentities(), and your XML is still invalid?

Can you supply a *small* sample, before and after

[zulubanshee]

You had it right! I had to change the character set from UTF-8 to 8859.

britlinks created a great function here

[us3.php.net...]

Thanks for your help dude!

[httpwebwitch]

hey no problem zulubanshee. cheers

[vincevincevince]

Real problem is that browsers are POST-ing those characters even when a form is served UTF-8. If a form is served UTF-8 then the browser should only be allowing UTF-8 content within it.