Question

I need to clean a string that comes (copy/pasted) from various Microsoft Office suite applications (Excel, Access, and Word), each with its own set of encoding.

I’m using json_encode for debugging purposes in order to being able to see every single encoded character.

I’m able to clean everything I found so far (\r \n) with str_replace, but with \u00a0 I have no luck.

$string = '[e-mail]\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0;[e-mail]'; //this is the output from json_encode

$clean = str_replace("\u00a0", "",$string);

returns:

[e-mail]\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0;[e-mail]

That is exactly the same; it completely ignores \u00a0.

Is there a way around this? Also, I’m feeling I’m reinventing the wheel, is there a function/class that completely strips EVERY possibile char of EVERY possible encoding?

____EDIT____

After the first two replies I need to clarify that my example DOES work, because it’s the output from json_encode, not the actual string!

Answer 1

Works for me, when I copy/paste your code. Try replacing the double quotes in your str_replace() with single quotes, or escaping the backslash ("\\u00a0").