php remove/identify this symbol �

Question

EDIT:

Ok I have some data (A ton of data) being pulled from a MySQL DB Table, nothing special about how the data is entered. When parsing the data and re-displaying

Answer 1

You can look into iconv() and mb_* functions if you're just trying to sanitize the data.

The most likely cause as observed elsewhere is that you've got a problem with character encodings. PHP is not very good at dealing with character encodings until version 6 (dealing with byte arrays and leaving encoding issues more or less up to the developer to deal with).

Make sure you're displaying the page in the same character encoding as your database, and make sure that you convert all user input into that same character encoding (iconv() and mb_detect_encoding() will help) before sticking it in the database.