Question

I’m writing a function to clear text which works with or without ut8 characters.

I keep getting text like this.

Coventry Salary - �25,000 - �35,000 

but with this function it removes the � but leaves other.

I want to know if anyone wrote a function which cleans the text.

function convertHTMLSpecialChars ( $str='' ) 
{
    $str = htmlspecialchars ( $str );
    $str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($str));
    $str = htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    return $str;
}

Answer 1

this function:

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($str));

just tries to detect the character set from $str; if it finds that $str contains
utf8 characters it will return “utf8” so the func will be actually:

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');

which doesnt help much..
in my opinion you should give the character set of your string by hand.
for example, if its turkish: iso-8859-5, if its greek: iso-8859-7 and so..