removing strange characters from php string

This is my function that always works, regardless of encoding:

function RemoveBS($Str) {  
  $StrArr = str_split($Str); $NewStr = '';
  foreach ($StrArr as $Char) {    
    $CharNo = ord($Char);
    if ($CharNo == 163) { $NewStr .= $Char; continue; } // keep £ 
    if ($CharNo > 31 && $CharNo < 127) {
      $NewStr .= $Char;    
    }
  }  
  return $NewStr;
}

How it works:

echo RemoveBS('Hello õhowå åare youÆ?'); // Hello how are you?

This will remove all non-ascii characters / special characters from a string.

//Remove from a single line string
$output = "Likening ‘not-critical’ with";
$output = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $output);
echo $output;
 
//Remove from a multi-line string
$output = "Likening ‘not-critical’ with \n Likening ‘not-critical’ with \r Likening ‘not-critical’ with. ' ! -.";
$output = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)\x0A\x0D]*/','', $output);
echo $output;

I solved the problem. Seems to be a short fix rather than the larger issue, but it works.

$newtitle = str_replace('’', "'", $newtitle);

I also found this useful snippit that may help others with same problem;

<?
$find[] = '“'; // left side double smart quote
$find[] = 'â€'; // right side double smart quote
$find[] = '‘'; // left side single smart quote
$find[] = '’'; // right side single smart quote
$find[] = '…'; // elipsis
$find[] = '—'; // em dash
$find[] = '–'; // en dash

$replace[] = '"';
$replace[] = '"';
$replace[] = "'";
$replace[] = "'";
$replace[] = "...";
$replace[] = "-";
$replace[] = "-";

$text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);
?>

Thanks everyone for your time and consideration.

Yeah this is not working for me. What is the workaround for this? – vaichidrewar Mar 12 at 22:29

Add this to the HTML head (or modify if already there):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

This will encode the funny chars like "“" into UTF-8 so that the str_replace() function will interpret them properly.

Or you can do this:

ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8');

Is the character encoding setting for your PHP server something other than UTF-8? If so, is there a reason or could it be changed to UTF-8? Though we don't store data in UTF-8 in our database, I've found that setting the webserver's character set to UTF-8 seems to help resolve character set issues.

I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions about this... whether I'm setting myself up for problems by setting webserver to UTF-8 while storing submitted data in Latin1 in our mysql database. I know there was a reason I chose Latin1 for the database but can't recall what it was. Interestingly, our current setup seems to allow for non-UTF-8 character entry and subsequent rendering... it seems that storing in Latin1 doesn't prevent subsequent decoding and display of all UTF-8 characters?

Use the below PHP code to remove

html_entity_decode(mb_convert_encoding(stripslashes($name), "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8'))

Read up on http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php

That & symbol is a html code so you can easily decode it.

Super simple solution is to have the characters decoded when the page is loaded

Simply copy/paste the following at the beginning of the script

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

 mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');  
 mb_http_output('UTF-8'); 
 mb_http_input('UTF-8');  
 mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');

Reference: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-internal-encoding.php comment left by webfav at web dot de

Many Strange Character be removed by applying mysqli_set_charset($con,"utf8"); below the mysql connection code.

but in some circumstances of removing this type strange character like â€

we need to use: $title = ' Stefen Suraj'; $newtitle = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $title); echo $newtitle;

Output will be: Stefen Suraj

It does not work You need to use $arr1 = str_split($str) then foreach and echo($arr1[$k]) This will show you exactly which characters are written into the string.

Please Try this. 


$find[] = '/“/' //'“'; // left side double smart quote
$find[] = '/”/' //'â€'; // right side double smart quote
$find[] = '/‘/' //'‘'; // left side single smart quote
$find[] = '/’/' //'’'; // right side single smart quote
$find[] = '/â€&#133/'  //'…'; // elipsis
$find[] = '/‖/' //'—'; // em dash
$find[] = '/–/' //'–'; // en dash

$replace[] = '“' // '"';
$replace[] = '”' // '"';
$replace[] = '‘' // "'";
$replace[] = '’' // "'";
$replace[] = '⋯' // "...";
$replace[] = '—' // "-";
$replace[] = '–' // "-";

$text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);

1.The order of the strings in the $find array is significant. 2.This string "‘" should contain a tilde and look like three characters. If I save the .php file with my Genie editor it gits changed to just two characters "â€". 3.This is a useful reference https://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html

<?php
$text = "‘’“â€1‘ 2’ 3â€â€œâ€™â€˜ 4’ 5 6 7’ ‘, ’, “, â€â€˜";
echo($text . "<br>");
$find = array("‘", "’", "“", "â€");
$replace = array("‘", "’", "“", "”");
$text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);
echo($text);
?>

Just one simple solution.

if your string contains these type of strange chars suppose $text contains some of these then just do as shown bellow:

$mytext=mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8')

and it will work..