PHP and character encoding problem with  character

Question

I'm having a problem where PHP (5.2) cannot find the character 'Â' in a string, though it is clearly there.

I realize the underlying problem has to do with character encoding, but unfortunately I have no control over the source content. I receive it as UTF-8, with those characters already in the string.

I would simply like to remove it from the string. strpos(), str_replace(), preg_replace(), trim(), etc. Cannot correctly identify it.

My string is this:

"Â  Â  Â  A lot of couples throughout the World "

If I do this:

$string = str_replace('Â','',$string);

I get this:

"� � � A lot of couples throughout the World"

I even tried utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() before the str_replace, with no luck.

What's the solution? I've been throwing everything I can find at it...

Answer 1

From the PHP Manual Comment Page:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php#96847

And from StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542818/remove-accents-without-using-iconv

Answer 2

I use this:

function replaceSpecial($str){
$chunked = str_split($str,1);
$str = ""; 
foreach($chunked as $chunk){
    $num = ord($chunk);
    // Remove non-ascii & non html characters
    if ($num >= 32 && $num <= 123){
            $str.=$chunk;
    }
}   
return $str;
} 

Answer 3

$string = str_replace('Â','',$string);

How is this 'Â' encoded? If your script file is saved as iso-8859-1 the string 'Â' is encoded as the one byte sequence xC2 while the (/one) utf-8 representation is xC3 x82. php's str_replace() works on the byte level, i.e. it only "knows" single-byte characters.

see http://docs.php.net/intro.mbstring