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 think the best way to do something like this is by using ord() command. This way you will be able to keep characters written in any language. Just remember to first test your text's ord results. This will not work on unicode.

$name="βγδεζηΘKgfgebhjrf!@#$%^&";    
//this function will clear all non greek and english characters on greek-iso charset        
function replace_characters($string)    
{    
   $str_length=strlen($string);    
   for ($x=0;$x<$str_length;$x++)    
      {    
          $character=$string[$x];    
          if ((ord($character)>64 && ord($character)<91) || (ord($character)>96 && ord($character)<123) || (ord($character)>192 && ord($character)<210) || (ord($character)>210 && ord($character)<218) || (ord($character)>219 && ord($character)<250) || ord($character)==252 || ord($character)==254)    
             {    
                 $new_string=$new_string.$character;     
             }    
      }    
      return $new_string;    
}    
//end function    

$name=replace_characters($name);    

echo $name;