How to truncate non-ascii characters from string using PHP

Question

I have a following string as a Filename

$string = 'recyclage plétre francin.jpg';

and tried with following code

echo preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9|^.]/i', '_', iconv("UTF-8","ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT",$string));

as there is a special (non-ascii) character in filename it creates junk character while working with file uploading using PHP.

What I want is that replace any unicode (non-ascii) character with specific Ascii character. I want to keep all supported Ascii characters and remove non-ascii characters. I also want to keep / or \ slashes because of directory separators in filename where a root path will be given.

Edit: (below is not solved)

I am having a issue with recyclage plƒtre francin.JPG please the f character which displays output like recyclage pl and it had truncated .JPG. Actually file name was recyclage plâtre francin and when I was debugging it has shown recyclage plƒtre francin.JPG and rest is written just after that. Any Idea?

When I am trying to convert tri et recyclage du plâtre but when at the reading it shows tri et recyclage du plâtre and after conversion it shows tri et recyclage du pl^atre.

Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is a solution to my question. Finally I could able to see the conversion. Some Unicode characters are replaced with some Ascii characters. But after all everything is now working fine.

function toASCII($str)
{
    $accent   = 'ŠŒŽšœžŸ¥µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûýýþÿŔŕƒ';
    $noaccent = 'SOZsozYYuaaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnoooooouuuuybsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnoooooouuuyybyRra';
    $string = strtr(utf8_decode($string),utf8_decode($accent),$noaccent);
    return strtr($string, $accent, $noaccent);
}

Answer 2

If you use the TRANSLIT modifier, it replaces all characters which can't be displayed in the target encoding. Since é can be represented in ISO-8859-1 it is encoded as ANSI-Code 0xE9.

I guess you want something like that:

$string = 'recyclage plétre francin.jpg';
echo iconv("UTF-8","ASCII//TRANSLIT",$string);

The result with that iconv-call is: recyclage pletre francin.jpg

Answer 3

Check this code 

<?php

$string = 'recyclage plétre francin.jpg';
$str = preg_replace('/[^\x20-\x7E]/', '', $string);
echo $str;
?>

Answer 4

You can use simple one that will remove all chars except a-z, 0-9 or whitespace.

// Remove all characters that are not the separator, a-z, 0-9, or whitespace
$string = preg_replace('![^'.preg_quote('-').'a-z0-_9\s]+!', '', strtolower($string));
// Replace all separator characters and whitespace by a single separator
$string = preg_replace('!['.preg_quote('-').'\s]+!u', '-', $string);