Getting ’ instead of an apostrophe(') in PHP

To convert to HTML entities:

<?php
  echo mb_convert_encoding(
    file_get_contents('http://www.tvrage.com/quickinfo.php?show=Surviver&ep=20x02&exact=0'),
    "HTML-ENTITIES",
    "UTF-8"
  );
?>

See docs for mb_convert_encoding for more encoding options.

Your content is fine; the problem is with the headers the server is sending:

Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:502
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:45:32 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=1, max=25
Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Content-Type should be set to Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8, because this page is not HTML and uses the utf-8 encoding. Chromium on Mac guesses ISO-8859-1 and displays the characters you're describing.

If you are not in control of the site, specify the encoding as UTF-8 to whatever function you use to retrieve the content. I'm not familiar enough with PHP to know how exactly.

It sounds like you're using standard string functions on a UTF8 characters (’) that doesn't exist in ISO 8859-1. Check that you are using Unicode compatible PHP settings and functions. See also the multibyte string functions.

You Should check encode encoding origin then try to convert to correct encode type.

In my case, I read csv files then import to db. Some files displays well some not. I check encoding and see that file with encoding ASCII displays well, other file with UTF-8 is broken. So I use following code to convert encoding:

if(mb_detect_encoding($content) == 'UTF-8') {
    $content = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $content);
    file_put_contents($file_path, $content);
} else {
    $content = mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
    file_put_contents($file_path, $content);
}

After convert I push the content to file then process import to DB, now it displays well in front-end

If none of the above solutions work:

In my case I noticed that the single quote was a different style of single quote. Instead of ' my data had a ’. Notice the difference in the single quote? So I simply wrote a str_replace to replace it and it fixed the problem. Probably not the most elegant solution but it got the job done.

$string= str_replace("’","'",$string);

I looked at the link, and it looks like UTF-8 to me. i.e., in Firefox, if you pick View, Character Encoding, UTF-8, it will appear correctly.

So, you just need to figure out how to get your PHP code to process that as UTF-8. Good luck!

If nothing works try this mb_convert_encoding($elem->textContent, 'UTF-8', 'utf8mb4');