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

$text = iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8//IGNORE", $text);

This is what I am using. Seems to work pretty well. Taken from http://planetozh.com/blog/2005/01/remove-invalid-characters-in-utf-8/