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 using json_encode for debugging purposes in order to being able to see every single encoded character.

I'm able to clean everything I found so far (\r \n) with str_replace, but with \u00a0 I have no luck.

$string = 'mail@mail.com\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0;mail@mail.com'; //this is the output from json_encode

$clean = str_replace("\u00a0", "",$string);

returns:

mail@mail.com\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0;mail@mail.com

That is exactly the same; it completely ignores \u00a0.

Is there a way around this? Also, I'm feeling I'm reinventing the wheel, is there a function/class that completely strips EVERY possibile char of EVERY possible encoding?

____EDIT____

After the first two replies I need to clarify that my example DOES work, because it's the output from json_encode, not the actual string!

Answer 1

Works for me, when I copy/paste your code. Try replacing the double quotes in your str_replace() with single quotes, or escaping the backslash ("\\u00a0").

Answer 2

By combining ord() with substr() on my string containing \u00a0, I found the following curse to work:

$text = str_replace( chr( 194 ) . chr( 160 ), ' ', $text );

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

A minor point: \u00a0 is actually a non-breaking space character, c.f. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a0/index.htm

So it might be more correct to replace it with " "

Answer 5

You have to do this with single quotes like this:

str_replace('\u00a0', "",$string);

Or, if you like to use double quotes, you have to escape the backslash - which would look like this:

str_replace("\\u00a0", "",$string);

Answer 6

This one also works, i found somewhere

$str = trim($str, chr(0xC2).chr(0xA0));

Answer 7

This did the trick for me:

$str = preg_replace( "~\x{00a0}~siu", " ", $str );