French apostrophe problem

[Kor]

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?

[Kor]

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?