weird white space characters - utf8 PHP

Question

I have a weird whitespaces in string, white spaces are not white spaces. I have a problem with converting them with regex and str_replace i.e.

echo str_repla         


        

Answer 1

I think I got it, from PHP site:

You might wonder why

trim(html_entity_decode(' '));    

doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the ' ' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 characterset.