Can't remove special characters with str_replace

Question

I have a very trivial problem with str_replace.

I have a string with the En Dash character ( - ) like this:

I want to remove - the dash

Answer 1

try something like this:

str_replace(html_entity_decode('–', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'), '', $string);

My guess is it's not really an ndash, but a very similar character. I'd suggest pulling the byte values of each character in the string to see what it looks like:

function decodeString($str) {
    //Fix for mb overloading strlen option
    if (function_exists('mb_strlen')) { 
        $len = mb_strlen($str, '8bit');
    } else {
        $len = strlen($str);
    }
    $ret = '';
    for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
        $ret .= dechex(ord($str[$i])).' ';
    }
    return trim($ret);
}

That'll convert the string into the individual byte encodings (turn it into a hex string like 48 65 6C 6C 6F (Hello). Check to see the dash in both cases is in fact the same character. If you see "2D" where the dash is, that's a literal minus sign... If you see the three byte sequence E2 80 93, that's –. Anything else means a different character...

EDIT: And if you see 26 6E 64 61 73 68 3B that mens a literal –, so you'd need to do str_replace('–', '', $str);