Remove non-utf8 characters from string

Question

Im having a problem with removing non-utf8 characters from string, which are not displaying properly. Characters are like this 0x97 0x61 0x6C 0x6F (hex representation)

Answer 1

try this:

$string = iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE",$string);

According to the iconv manual, the function will take the first parameter as the input charset, second parameter as the output charset, and the third as the actual input string.

If you set both the input and output charset to UTF-8, and append the //IGNORE flag to the output charset, the function will drop(strip) all characters in the input string that can't be represented by the output charset. Thus, filtering the input string in effect.