How to convert 'u00e9' to utf8 characters in mysql or php?

Question

I am doing data cleaning on some messy data that I am importing into mysql.

The data contains "pseudo" unicode characters that are actually embedded in the string, such as "u00e9" etc.

So a field might be.."Jalostotitlu00e1n" I need to rip off that awkward 'u00e1n' and replace it with the corresponding utf character

I could do this in mysql, maybe using substrings and CHR, but I'm preprocessing the data via PHP, so I can do it there as well.

I already know how to configure mysql and php to use utf data. The problem actually lies in the source data I imported.

Thank you

Answer 1

/* php function to convert utf8 html to ansi */

public static function Utf8_ansi($valor='') {

    $utf8_ansi2 = array(
    "\u00c0" =>"À",
    "\u00c1" =>"Á",
    "\u00c2" =>"Â",
    "\u00c3" =>"Ã",
    "\u00c4" =>"Ä",
    "\u00c5" =>"Å",
    "\u00c6" =>"Æ",
    "\u00c7" =>"Ç",
    "\u00c8" =>"È",
    "\u00c9" =>"É",
    "\u00ca" =>"Ê",
    "\u00cb" =>"Ë",
    "\u00cc" =>"Ì",
    "\u00cd" =>"Í",
    "\u00ce" =>"Î",
    "\u00cf" =>"Ï",
    "\u00d1" =>"Ñ",
    "\u00d2" =>"Ò",
    "\u00d3" =>"Ó",
    "\u00d4" =>"Ô",
    "\u00d5" =>"Õ",
    "\u00d6" =>"Ö",
    "\u00d8" =>"Ø",
    "\u00d9" =>"Ù",
    "\u00da" =>"Ú",
    "\u00db" =>"Û",
    "\u00dc" =>"Ü",
    "\u00dd" =>"Ý",
    "\u00df" =>"ß",
    "\u00e0" =>"à",
    "\u00e1" =>"á",
    "\u00e2" =>"â",
    "\u00e3" =>"ã",
    "\u00e4" =>"ä",
    "\u00e5" =>"å",
    "\u00e6" =>"æ",
    "\u00e7" =>"ç",
    "\u00e8" =>"è",
    "\u00e9" =>"é",
    "\u00ea" =>"ê",
    "\u00eb" =>"ë",
    "\u00ec" =>"ì",
    "\u00ed" =>"í",
    "\u00ee" =>"î",
    "\u00ef" =>"ï",
    "\u00f0" =>"ð",
    "\u00f1" =>"ñ",
    "\u00f2" =>"ò",
    "\u00f3" =>"ó",
    "\u00f4" =>"ô",
    "\u00f5" =>"õ",
    "\u00f6" =>"ö",
    "\u00f8" =>"ø",
    "\u00f9" =>"ù",
    "\u00fa" =>"ú",
    "\u00fb" =>"û",
    "\u00fc" =>"ü",
    "\u00fd" =>"ý",
    "\u00ff" =>"ÿ");

    return strtr($valor, $utf8_ansi2);      

}

Answer 2

There is a way. Replace all uXXXX with their HTML representation and execute html_entity_decode()

That isecho html_entity_decode("Jalostotitlán");

Every UTF character of the form

u1234 can be printed in HTML as ሴ. But doing the replacement is very difficult because if there are no other characters to identify the beginning of the UTF sequence, you can get a lot of false positives. A simple regular expression might be

preg_replace('/u([\da-fA-F]{4})/', '&#x\1;', $str)