Replacing   and ° in PHP

[brent.fraser]

Hi everyone.

It has been some time since I have done any coding (perl) and I am running into a bit of a headache. I am using some PHP and JS I downloaded from your site (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...pausescroller/) and I am putting a weather RRS feed on a web-page I am creating. The RSS is working as I am getting the information into my HTML browser but it is having   and ° in the output and not a space and degree symbol. I know from my long past days of perl that you can replace those with spaces and characters. I am still looking around the net for answers currently.... I looked into the PHP script and I think I have identified the place for the replacement of the values when outputting it into javascript:

// -------------------------------------------------------------------
// outputRSS_JS()- Outputs the "title", "link", "description", and "pubDate" elements of an RSS 

feed in XML format
// -------------------------------------------------------------------

function outputRSS_JS($url, $divid) {
    global $rss;
    if ($rs = $rss->get($url)){
        echo "rsscontentdata.$divid=new Array();\n";
        $i=0;
            foreach ($rs['items'] as $item) {
                echo "rsscontentdata.$divid" . "[$i]={link:\"" . slashit($item[link]) . "\", 

title:\"" . slashit($item[title]) . "\", description:\"" . slashit($item[description]) . "\", 

date:\"" . slashit($item[pubDate]) . "\"}\n";
        $i++;
            }
            if ($rs['items_count'] <= 0) { echo "rsscontentdata=\"Sorry, no items found in the RSS 

file\""; }
    }
    else {
        echo "rsscontentdata=\"Sorry: It's not possible to reach RSS file $url\"";
        // All else fails
    }
}

function slashit($what){ //Encode text for storing in JavaScript array
$newstring=str_replace('&apos;', '\'', $what);//replace those half valid apostrophe entities with actual apostrophes
return rawurlencode($newstring);
} 

I have tried to change

$newstring=str_replace(''', '\'', $what); 

to

$newstring=str_replace(' ', ' ', $what); 

and that isn't working in the output as I still see "&nbsp".

Any suggestions on how to replace the " " and "°" in the PHP script?

Thanks for the patience.....