How to use UTF-8 characters in a PHP script?

Question

How to use UTF-8 characters in a PHP script?

I know that there is an escape character to interpret the following two characters as UTF-8 . This escape \s . So, \xFF works, which will represent " ÿ ". But now I want to remove spaces of zero width ( U+200B ) from the string. How to do it? Can I use str_replace() or maybe preg_replace() ?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This worked for me:

 $str = str_replace("\xe2\x80\x8b", '', $str); 

Sources

• http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200b/index.htm
• http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?start=8192&number=128&utf8=string-literal

Answer 2

You can try mb_ereg_replace() or iconv() with str_replace.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-ereg-replace.php
http://hu.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

Answer 3

Remove the zero width space:

 $str = str_replace(chr(13), "", $str);