Remove Â from string using preg_replace

Question

when i remove money characters then it work but i must require this chars

echo "Product Name :: ".$product_name = 'Â£5 off bookings at A1Travel';

echo "<br/>".$product_name = preg_replace('/(^([^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥])*|([^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥])*$)/', '', $product_name);

Output is :

‚Â£5 off bookings at A1Travel

Desired output:

£5 off bookings at A1Travel

What are you trying to do in `preg_replace`, can you clarify? — anubhava, Dec 22 '14 at 10:10
remove special characters. Allow only alpah numeric and money characters from string — Yatin Mistry, Dec 22 '14 at 10:15
You should look at fixing the actual character encoding issue rather than a hack like this. — cmbuckley, Dec 22 '14 at 10:23
These kind of string are coming from api so i don't have access on it. — Yatin Mistry, Dec 22 '14 at 10:34

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

2

You have added ^ and $ which means it would only match at the beginning or end of string. So you need to remove them:

/(([^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥])*|([^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥])*)/

This means your regex could be simplified to:

/[^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥]*/

Now let's improve it further. You never want to replace an empty string with nothing. So let's change the quantifier from * (zero or more times) to + (one or more times):

/[^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥]+/

You'll notice that this also removes spaces, so let's exclude it as well:

/[^a-zA-Z0-9$¢£€¥ ]+/

If you want to make it shorter, let's use the i modifier to match case insensitive and remove A-Z:

/[^a-z0-9$¢£€¥ ]+/i

After some debugging, it seems we need to handle utf/unicode problems. So let's add the u modifier like nhahtdh said:

/[^a-z0-9$¢£€¥ ]+/ui

To test this, you will also need to set the encoding for your HTML page. A simple example would look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
    </head>
    <body>
        <?php
            $product_name = 'Â£5 off bookings at A1Travel';
            echo 'Product Name :: ' . $product_name . '<br>';

            $product_name = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9$¢£€¥ ]+/ui', '', $product_name);

            echo $product_name . '<br>';
        ?>
    </body>
</html>

regex demo

edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Community

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answered Dec 22 '14 at 10:25

HamZa

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I have run at https://regex101.com/r/iQ5oT9/1 here it works but in my php page it is not working – Yatin Mistry Dec 22 '14 at 10:30
1

All PHP regex should use `u` flag regardless, since non-UTF mode doesn't work on Unicode. Note that regex101 compiles from 16-bit library, while PHP uses 8-bit library. – nhahtdh Dec 22 '14 at 10:44
@YatinMistry See edit. You will need to use the `u` modifier like @nhahtdh said. Also you need to set the encoding of your html page to utf-8. – HamZa Dec 22 '14 at 10:52
@Hamza and nhahtdh thanks a lot it works now. Live server i have tried it without meta tag and it works. – Yatin Mistry Dec 22 '14 at 11:04
@YatinMistry I would check [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) out. Maybe your live server is sending the page encoding along the headers... – HamZa Dec 22 '14 at 11:08

anubhava · Answer 2 · 2014-12-22T10:39:34.347

0

You can use:

$input = 'Â£5 off bookings at A1Travel';
$input = preg_replace('/[^\x00-\x7f£¢£€¥]+/u', '', $input);
//=> £5 off bookings at A1Travel

RegEx Demo

edited Dec 22 '14 at 10:39

answered Dec 22 '14 at 10:20

anubhava

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Shouldn't `u` flag be used here? – nhahtdh Dec 22 '14 at 10:38
Thanks @nhahtdh: Added `u` flag, I think regex101 demo didn't need it. – anubhava Dec 22 '14 at 10:40
1

regex101 compiles from 16-bit PCRE library (UTF-16), while PHP uses the 8-bit library (UTF-8). – nhahtdh Dec 22 '14 at 10:42

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 22 '14 at 10:35

0

please try this

$str= 'Â£5 off bookings at A1Travel';
preg_replace('/[^\p{Latin}\d ]/u', '', $str);

answered Dec 22 '14 at 10:35

Arun

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score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 09 '19 at 13:12

0

you can try this method also it will be much helpful

To remove â character from string

mysqli_set_charset($con,"utf8");

$price = "â‚¹ 310.00";

$price2 = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $price);

Result : 310.00

this helps to remove character like Remove Â from string using preg_replace

Thanks

edited Jul 09 '19 at 13:12

JIJOMON K.A

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answered Jul 09 '19 at 11:42

Solomon Suraj

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Remove Â from string using preg_replace

4 Answers4

RegEx Demo