replace awkward characters in string php

Question

Is there a string functions which replaces all the awkward characters, like

Hellö becomes Hello,

Or do i need the following strtr function, and put all the awkward characters in the...?

$addr = strtr($addr, "äåö", "aao");

Can you specify more precisely what you mean by "awkward characters"? — Mark Byers
– Mark Byers, Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 22:44

Mark Byers · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-15 22:39:14Z

4

I'm assuming by "awkward characters" you mean anything that is not ASCII. If so, then try iconv:

$addr = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $addr);

The first argument is the character set of the input string.

$addr = "Hellö";
echo $addr . "\n";
$addr = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $addr);
echo $addr . "\n";

Output

Hellö
Hello

See it run at ideone.

answered Dec 15, 2010 at 22:29

Mark Byers

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7 Comments

don't do this ... if the text contains valid UTF-8, it will get converted as well

@ajrael: What this does is to take the characters that are not valid ASCII and convert them as best as possible to valid ASCII.

Yup, at the meantime, it also replace valid UTF-8 to ?. However, is depend on OP environment setting.

Is it safe then...? What to do...? Regards!

If you page encoding is iso-8859-*, please go ahead

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