Question

It basically comes down to this. I have a string called $name. $name usually has the value ”blablabla”, the value comes from an external resource so that’s why it’s encapsulated in two single quotes. If i would declare this variable myself it would look like this:
$name = "''blablabla''";

I am deleting these single quotes by:

$name[0] = '';
$name[1] = '';
$name[mb_strlen($name, 'UTF-8')-1] = '';
$name[mb_strlen($name, 'UTF-8')-2] = ''; 

(unsetting the string with a index doesn’t work)
So now I have $name with value “blablabla” without the signle quotes.
Here’s my problem.
When I look at the source code, there are strange characters before the “blablabla”.
How can I deal with this?
And, is there any way to reindex my string (for example what array_values does for arrays)?

EDIT
Eventually I used this code :

$name = mb_substr($name, 2, -2, 'UTF-8');

Answer 1

$name = "''foo''";

$name = substr($name, 2, -2);

echo $name; # foo

1. You’re dealing with encodings, while the characters in question (') are single-byte. Strings in PHP are still binary only, which means, you can just cut it off at the ends.
2. When you unset using the index, keep in mind that it’s the binary position. mb_strlen does not suit to gather the binary index position, strlen does:

.

$name = "''foo''";

$name[0] = '';
$name[1] = '';

$len = strlen($name); # binary safe string length

$name[$len-1] = '';
$name[$len-2] = '';

echo $name; # foo

mb_strlen compared with strlen

$utf8 = 'ä';
mb_strlen($utf8, 'UTF-8'); # 1
strlen($utf8);             # 2

$utf8[1] != 'ä';