removing strange characters from php string

Question

this is what i have right now

Drawing an RSS feed into the php, the raw xml from the rss feed reads:

Paul’s Confidence

The ph

Answer 1

This is my function that always works, regardless of encoding:

function RemoveBS($Str) {  
  $StrArr = str_split($Str); $NewStr = '';
  foreach ($StrArr as $Char) {    
    $CharNo = ord($Char);
    if ($CharNo == 163) { $NewStr .= $Char; continue; } // keep £ 
    if ($CharNo > 31 && $CharNo < 127) {
      $NewStr .= $Char;    
    }
  }  
  return $NewStr;
}

How it works:

echo RemoveBS('Hello õhowå åare youÆ?'); // Hello how are you?

Answer 2

This will remove all non-ascii characters / special characters from a string.

//Remove from a single line string
$output = "Likening ‘not-critical’ with";
$output = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $output);
echo $output;
 
//Remove from a multi-line string
$output = "Likening ‘not-critical’ with \n Likening ‘not-critical’ with \r Likening ‘not-critical’ with. ' ! -.";
$output = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)\x0A\x0D]*/','', $output);
echo $output;

Answer 3

Many Strange Character be removed by applying mysqli_set_charset($con,"utf8"); below the mysql connection code.

but in some circumstances of removing this type strange character like â€

we need to use: $title = ' Stefen Suraj'; $newtitle = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $title); echo $newtitle;

Output will be: Stefen Suraj

Answer 4

Just one simple solution.

if your string contains these type of strange chars suppose $text contains some of these then just do as shown bellow:

$mytext=mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8')

and it will work..

Answer 5

Yeah this is not working for me. What is the workaround for this? – vaichidrewar Mar 12 at 22:29

Add this to the HTML head (or modify if already there):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

This will encode the funny chars like "“" into UTF-8 so that the str_replace() function will interpret them properly.

Or you can do this:

ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8');

Answer 6

Is the character encoding setting for your PHP server something other than UTF-8? If so, is there a reason or could it be changed to UTF-8? Though we don't store data in UTF-8 in our database, I've found that setting the webserver's character set to UTF-8 seems to help resolve character set issues.

I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions about this... whether I'm setting myself up for problems by setting webserver to UTF-8 while storing submitted data in Latin1 in our mysql database. I know there was a reason I chose Latin1 for the database but can't recall what it was. Interestingly, our current setup seems to allow for non-UTF-8 character entry and subsequent rendering... it seems that storing in Latin1 doesn't prevent subsequent decoding and display of all UTF-8 characters?