Remove non-ascii characters from string

Question

I\'m getting strange characters when pulling data from a website:

Â

How can I remove anything that isn\'t a non-extended ASCII character?

Answer 1

I also think that the best solution might be to use a regular expression.

Here's my suggestion:

function convert_to_normal_text($text) {

    $normal_characters = "a-zA-Z0-9\s`~!@#$%^&*()_+-={}|:;<>?,.\/\"\'\\\[\]";
    $normal_text = preg_replace("/[^$normal_characters]/", '', $text);

    return $normal_text;
}

Then you can use it like this:

$before = 'Some "normal characters": Abc123!+, some ASCII characters: ABC+ŤĎ and some non-ASCII characters: Ąąśćł.';
$after = convert_to_normal_text($before);
echo $after;

Displays:

Some "normal characters": Abc123!+, some ASCII characters: ABC+ and some non-ASCII characters: .