Question

When reading text from word files, I get the following output. Some weird characters are printed out. Is there any way to remove them?

I use this function to read from docx files

function readDocx() {
    // Create new ZIP archive
    $zip = new ZipArchive;
    $dataFile = 'word/document.xml';
    // Open received archive file
    if (true === $zip->open($this->doc_path)) {
        // If done, search for the data file in the archive
        if (($index = $zip->locateName($dataFile)) !== false) {
            // If found, read it to the string
            $data = $zip->getFromIndex($index);
            // Close archive file
            $zip->close();
            // Load XML from a string
            // Skip errors and warnings
            $xml = DOMDocument::loadXML($data, LIBXML_NOENT | LIBXML_XINCLUDE | LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_NOWARNING);
            // Return data without XML formatting tags

            $contents = explode('\n',strip_tags($xml->saveXML()));
            $text = '';
            foreach($contents as $i=>$content) {
                $text .= $contents[$i];
            }
            return $text;
        }
        $zip->close();
    }
    // In case of failure return empty string
    return "";
}

Answer 1

This is the part I love most:

        $contents = explode('\n',strip_tags($xml->saveXML()));
        $text = '';
        foreach($contents as $i=>$content) {
            $text .= $contents[$i];
        }
        return $text;

No idea where you copied it from, but it’s basically:

        $text = strip_tags($xml->saveXML());
        return $text;

Next to that, saveXML() returns a string in UTF-8 encoding. Your browser expects something else, so just change the encoding to that something (you should know it).

As I don’t know what is probably unknown to you as well, just wrap anything into HTML entities to make this dead-safe:

        $text = strip_tags($xml->saveXML());
        return htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

The real fix actually would be that you understand what you are sending to the browser and then tell the browser what it is.