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

Maybe not the most precise solution, but it gets the job done with a single line of code:

echo str_replace("?","",(utf8_decode($str)));

utf8_decode will convert the characters to a question mark;
str_replace will strip out the question marks.