French apostrophe problem

I have to send some data from an XML file to a MySQL table. Some text there have French apostrophes (’), and I need to replace them with single quotes (')

I tried a lot of methods, including RegExp, with no success. No matter what I tried, the resulted character into the DB remains a question mark (?)

Additional Info:

- the XML is Microsoft Spreadsheet 2003 formatted. I get it from exporting an Excel 2007 Worksheet. I don't want to encode it manually as utf-8.

- I use the DOMDocument::load() method to read the XML file in PHP

- the fields of the MySQL table have the collation : latin1_swedish_ci. I can not change that.


Any ideas? Has anyone encounter this problem and found a solution?

Hm...

I ended by using this function

function convert_ascii($string)
{
// Replace Single Curly Quotes
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(152);
$replace[] = "'";
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(153);
$replace[] = "'";

// Replace Smart Double Curly Quotes
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(156);
$replace[] = '"';
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(157);
$replace[] = '"';

// Replace En Dash
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(147);
$replace[] = '--';

// Replace Em Dash
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(148);
$replace[] = '---';

// Replace Bullet
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(162);
$replace[] = '*';

// Replace Middle Dot
$search[] = chr(194).chr(183);
$replace[] = '*';

// Replace Ellipsis with three consecutive dots
$search[] = chr(226).chr(128).chr(166);
$replace[] = '...';

// Apply Replacements
$string = str_replace($search, $replace, $string);

// Remove any non-ASCII Characters
//$string = preg_replace("/[^\x01-\x7F]/","", $string);

return $string;
}

It solves almost all my problems. I have also to solve the problems of the ligatures, but that is easy.

Do you have any other ideas?