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

This should be pretty straight forwards and no need for iconv function:

// Remove all characters that are not the separator, a-z, 0-9, or whitespace
$string = preg_replace('![^'.preg_quote('-').'a-z0-_9\s]+!', '', strtolower($string));
// Replace all separator characters and whitespace by a single separator
$string = preg_replace('!['.preg_quote('-').'\s]+!u', '-', $string);