What is the best way to remove punctuation marks, symbols, diacritics, special characters?

Question

I use these lines of code to remove all punctuation marks, symbols, etc as you can see them in the array,

$pattern_page = array(\"+\",\",\",\".\",\"-\",\"\'\         


        

Answer 1

Use classes:

preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $input);

Would remove anything that's not considered a "character" by the currently set locale. If it's punctuation, you seek to eliminate, the class would be [:punct:].

\W means "any non-word character" and is the opposite of \w which includes underscores (_).

Answer 2

Depending on how greedy you'd like to be, you could do something like:

$pg_url = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z 0-9]+/", " ", $pg_url);

This will replace anything that isn't a letter, number or space.