Remove non-utf8 characters from string

Question

Im having a problem with removing non-utf8 characters from string, which are not displaying properly. Characters are like this 0x97 0x61 0x6C 0x6F (hex representation)

Answer 1

You can use mbstring:

$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');

...will remove invalid characters.

See: Replacing invalid UTF-8 characters by question marks, mbstring.substitute_character seems ignored