PHP replace weird space

Question

I have and Excel file that I converted to a CSV file. Apparently there are two kinds of spaces in this file, the regular space and a non-breaking space (my assumption).

When saving the data to the database the non-breaking space gets saved as a black diamond with a question mark (�).

I've been reading around as this probably has solutions already but when I try them, nothing is happening.

Using the mb_substr approach:

$name = !empty($data[0]) ? mb_substr($data[0], 0, mb_strlen($data[0]), "UTF-8") : null;

Using the str_replace approach:

$name = !empty($data[0]) ? str_replace("&nbsp;", " ", $data[0]) : null;

Edit

I'm using Oracle for the database and here are the Character Sets defined:

NLS_CHARACTERSET       = AL32UTF8
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET = AL16UTF16

Here's a sample data:

, W.R.,

The space before W is the character that gets transformed into the question mark.

what kind of database are you using? Maybe the DB isn't configured to use UTF-8? — J J, Apr 22 '16 at 18:17
Have a look through http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through it could be anything really. — Funk Forty Niner, Apr 22 '16 at 18:19
when you say saving to the database, what database are you using?? MySQL?? what's your database character set?? is it UTF-8 unicode?? — aampudia, Apr 22 '16 at 18:20

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

If you look in your settings for the Excel program and see if you can establish the character set of the original file you can then upload the file and use PHP MB_convert_encoding function to translate from whatever Excel saves it as to UTF-8, or better yet simply export it as UTF-8 directly from Excel.

also be aware that if you're using MySQL the UTF8_ character set is BROKEN and UTF8mb4 should be used instead.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 22 '16 at 18:39

0

I was able to fix the issue with iconv:

$name = !empty($data[0]) ? iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $data[0]) : null;

answered Apr 22 '16 at 18:39

dokgu

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PHP replace weird space

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