Question

So what I have is a MS Word docx file that contains some data which is not really sorted really nice.

/example output

1.
Lastname, Firstname

Address, City, State Zip

By doing Ctrl+Shift+* I can view all the special characters that exists within the file.

( ¶, ˚ , etc…)

then replace them with a “,” to act as a separator then export the file on an excel format.

Would there be a way to replace this symbols using PHP?

Answer 1

This issue has been flogged many times here .. am only responding because yours have a little twist.

What you need to do is remove all the characters you don’t want , then replace all spaces ” ” with “,”

Removing none ASII Characters (3 Examples)

$string = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/', '', $string);
$string = preg_replace( '/[^[:print:]]/', '',$string);

Removing UTF8 Characters

$string = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/u', '', $string);

Removing Line Feeds , Carriage Returns and Tabs

$string = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/u', '', $string);

Replacing ” ” with “,” ;

$string = str_replace(" ",",",$string);
$string = trim($string,",");

You have more than enough options now ..

I hope this helps

Thanks
🙂