Question

I have a problem with a hidden character not showing up either in database (phpmyadmin) nor website. Website has utf-8 character encoding. If I copy/paste the string with the “hidden” character into Notepad I can see it. It looks just like a bullet character but is hidden. What type of character is this and can it be removed with PHP?

The user able to type this character is using Mac and are probably doing a copy/paste from a document (maybe unicode?) into a form on our website and saves it. So this character is not visible with utf-8 encoding but visible if I copy my string into a Notepad document.

This is the hidden character at the end of the string. Looks like a bullet:

Answer 1

Copy the character, then fire up PowerShell and do the following (yes, it’s convoluted, sorry):

'U+{0:X4}'-f+[char]'<PASTE>'

and paste the character where it says <PASTE>. It should give you the Unicode code point of that character. You then should be able to write something that removes it from the string, but from my eyes there shouldn’t be any input that destroys the document layout, except maybe fun things like RTL markers.

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Short explanation of the above: [char]'x' converts a single-character string to a char, + will then treat it as a number (similar to [int], but shorter). The rest is a format string and the formatting operator -f.