I have a string with “\u00a0”, and I need to replace it with “” str_replace fails

Question

I need to clean a string that comes (copy/pasted) from various Microsoft Office suite applications (Excel, Access, and Word), each with its own set of encoding.

I\'m

Answer 1

By combining ord() with substr() on my string containing \u00a0, I found the following curse to work:

$text = str_replace( chr( 194 ) . chr( 160 ), ' ', $text );

Answer 2

A minor point: \u00a0 is actually a non-breaking space character, c.f. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a0/index.htm

So it might be more correct to replace it with " "

Answer 3

This did the trick for me:

$str = preg_replace( "~\x{00a0}~siu", " ", $str );

Answer 4

Works for me, when I copy/paste your code. Try replacing the double quotes in your str_replace() with single quotes, or escaping the backslash ("\\u00a0").

Answer 5

I just had the same problem. Apparently PHP's json_encode will return null for any string with a 'non-breaking space' in it.

The Solution is to replace this with a regular space:

str_replace(chr(160),' ');

I hope this helps somebody - it took me an hour to figure out.

Answer 6

Try this:

$str = str_replace("\u{00a0}", ' ', $str);