I have a string with “\u00a0”, and I need to replace it with “” str_replace fails

Question

I need to clean a string that comes (copy/pasted) from various Microsoft Office suite applications (Excel, Access, and Word), each with its own set of encoding.

I\'m

Answer 1

I just had the same problem. Apparently PHP's json_encode will return null for any string with a 'non-breaking space' in it.

The Solution is to replace this with a regular space:

str_replace(chr(160),' ');

I hope this helps somebody - it took me an hour to figure out.