Question

First, the string is being pulled from an XML file.

There’s a special character that I am trying to replace: ‘£’

When I use str_replace like so:

$ability1 = str_replace("£", "", $ability);

This is what var_dump shows:

string(138) "Argothian Pixies can't be blocked by artifact creatures.�Prevent all damage that would be dealt to Argothian Pixies by artifact creatures."

Once $ability1 is passed and wordpress inserts it into the post. This is the result.

Argothian Pixies can’t be blocked by artifact creatures.

It deletes everything after the � character.

Why would £ be changed to � when its supposed to be “”. I’m not quite sure what I’m missing

Answer 1

Maybe your string is in UTF-8? PHP. You would have to do something like this:

$ability1 = utf8_decode($ability);
$ability1 = preg_replace("/[£ ]/","", $ability1);
$ability1 = utf8_encode($ability1);