How to replace bullets with •

Question

I am retrieving text data from a database which includes bullets and newlines. I have successfully removed the newlines and converted them to <br /> using the nl2br() function in PHP, but the bullets act weird and display "•" instead of "•" (see screenshot).

I have tried using htmlspecialchars() function in PHP but it still displays the same output.

Answer 1

The Unicode character U+2022 (BULLET) is encoded in UTF-8 as the octets E2 80 A2. If your page contains these octets, and the page is incorrectly interpreted using a different character encoding, such as Windows-1252, the resulting page will display the three characters â, €, ¢.

To properly display the bullet character, you need to declare the correct character encoding for your document:

header ('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

If it is not feasible to use the UTF-8 encoding, you can convert the string using htmlentities(), which should convert the bullet characters, and other undisplayable characters, into HTML character references (•):

$s = "Bullet \xe2\x80\xa2 character";
echo htmlentities ($s), "\n";

Or, if PHP's character encoding is not configured correctly:

$s = "Bullet \xe2\x80\xa2 character";
echo htmlentities ($s, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'utf-8'), "\n";

Answer 2

I have used htmlentities() now instead of htmlspecialchars. I have solved my own problem but I hope this thread will help others in the future.