How can I strip undisplayable characters from a string with PHP?

Question

I have a feed that pulls from social feeds. These feeds can sometimes include special characters such as emojis that don't translate well:

I just want to strip out any characters that can't be displayed. I know that might remove a few that I could want but that's fine. I know I can do a regex but not really sure how to target like what's in the photo.

---EDIT---

This is what is throwing the characters above:

*can't be displayed* Well you would need to specify that a bit clearer. (^^ Seems more like an encoding problem) — Rizier123, Jul 31 '15 at 01:00
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22178349/android-how-to-filter-emoji-emoticons-from-a-string — angelcool.net, Jul 31 '15 at 01:07
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1497885/remove-control-characters-from-php-string — user2182349, Jul 31 '15 at 01:10

SteJ · Answer 1 · 2015-07-31T02:04:52.350

2

Try using PHP Sanitize Filters, most specifically FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS

<?php
$a = 'text including "unprintable" characters';
$sanitized_a = filter_var($a, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);
echo $sanitized_a;
?>

Just be careful using this if there are some characters you want (like < and > for instance)! Check the link at the top for a full list of filters you can choose from.

edited Jul 31 '15 at 02:04

answered Jul 31 '15 at 01:24

SteJ

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How can I strip undisplayable characters from a string with PHP?

1 Answers1