How to replace Microsoft-encoded quotes in PHP

Considering you only want to replace a few specific and well identified characters, I would go for str_replace with an array: you obviously don't need the heavy artillery regex will bring you ;-)

And if you encounter some other special characters (damn copy-paste from Microsoft Word...), you can just add them to that array whenever is necessary / whenever they are identified.

The best answer I can give to your comment is probably this link: Convert Smart Quotes with PHP

And the associated code (quoting that page):

function convert_smart_quotes($string) 
{ 
    $search = array(chr(145), 
                    chr(146), 
                    chr(147), 
                    chr(148), 
                    chr(151)); 

    $replace = array("'", 
                     "'", 
                     '"', 
                     '"', 
                     '-'); 

    return str_replace($search, $replace, $string); 
} 

(I don't have Microsoft Word on this computer, so I can't test by myself)

I don't remember exactly what we used at work (I was not the one having to deal with that kind of input), but it was the same kind of stuff...

I have found an answer to this question. You need just one line of code using iconv() function in php:

// replace Microsoft Word version of single  and double quotations marks (“ ” ‘ ’) with  regular quotes (' and ")
$output = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $input);