Remove special characters in string

Question

I am currently doing this:

$a = 'some string with special characters';
$a = htmlentities($a);
$a = trim(preg_replace('/&#?[a-z0-9]+;/i', '', $a));

This works but I am wondering if there's a more efficient way to do this?

What's your definition of special and why do you need to remove them? — Álvaro González, May 07 '14 at 16:33
@ÁlvaroG.Vicario I am scraping an HTML page, it contains certain characters like `Â` and I want to remove those. — IMB, May 07 '14 at 16:35
Look here for the answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6073221/php-remove-special-character-from-string — R Pelzer, May 07 '14 at 16:36
@HenkdeJager That is quite the same to what I'm already doing. — IMB, May 07 '14 at 16:37
@ÁlvaroG.Vicario I'm only getting specific data, e.g., `Â data_i_need Â` — IMB, May 07 '14 at 16:45

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 07 '14 at 16:37

2

it contains certain characters like Â and I want to remove those.

Try utf8_decode, or more feature-filled:

$output = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $input);

The reason I bring this up is because what you are seeing are encoding issues, not "special characters".

answered May 07 '14 at 16:37

Do you happen to know how to apply that in `phpQuery`? More specifically, I am using `phpQuery::newDocumentFile` to scrape an HTML page. – IMB May 07 '14 at 16:41
I couldn't remember the name of the function, but this is what I was going to suggest. Converting the "special characters" to their similar counterpart wouldn't destroy the original text as much. – Jonathan Kuhn May 07 '14 at 16:41
Nope. No idea. But if there's any kind of encoding setting somewhere then you should set that to UTF-8 (instead of using the code in this answer - because this code is somewhat destructive) – Niet the Dark Absol May 07 '14 at 16:42
The OP clearly states that he wants to completely wipe out "special" characters (whatever that means), not decode them properly or convert to his application's encoding. Yet you have my +1 because I simply can't believe him :) – Álvaro González May 07 '14 at 16:54
@ÁlvaroG.Vicario Pfft, had me worried there! – Niet the Dark Absol May 07 '14 at 17:18

1 Answers1