PHP: regex to remove `â` or` â € `?

Question

I use this regex to remove all punctuation from string input,

$pg_url = preg_replace("/\W+/", " ", $pg_url); 

but there are some characters or special characters that I cannot delete, for example

 – 

when i pass this into my db injection it will either turn into âorâ€

How can I get rid of these strange things?

Thank.

Answer 1

These characters are encoded in Unicode , in particular UTF-8 .

You might want to use iconv family to convert them to some other encoding (for example, simple ASCII).