How To Clean Special Characters From PHP String

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If you are looking for the PHP special characters clean function then this post might be useful for you. This function can used to remove special character as well as able to replace specific character with other equivalent character or string.

Here is detailed explanation of function:

$specialCharacters Array: This array used to replace special character with other character or string. if you want to interchange (+) with (plus) then you need to specify in the array. You can add/remove array element according to your requirement.

strtr function: This function used to replace other language special characters to plain English character. You can remove this line safely but ensure before that these characters not in your string and you don’t need to remove them.
Last 4 line used to remove other unknown unwanted special characters.

function just_clean($string)
{
// Replace other special chars
$specialCharacters = array(
'#' => '',
'$' => '',
'%' => '',
'&' => '',
'@' => '',
'.' => '',
'' => '',
'+' => '',
'=' => '',
'' => '',
'\' => '',
'/' => '',
);</code>

while (list($character, $replacement) = each($specialCharacters)) {
$string = str_replace($character, '-' . $replacement . '-', $string);
}

$string = strtr($string,
"? ",
"AAAAAAaaaaaaOOOOOOooooooEEEEeeeeCcIIIIiiiiUUUUuuuuyNn"
);

// Remove all remaining other unknown characters
$string = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/', ' ', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/^[-]+/', '', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/[-]+$/', '', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/[-]{2,}/', ' ', $string);

return $string;
}


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14 Responses to “How To Clean Special Characters From PHP String”

  1. [...] How To Clean Special Characters From PHP String [...]

  2. Thanks for this post.

    Can you send me the full source code in plain text document (Notepad)? The code is malformed when I copy and paste from this post.

    Thanks!

  3. Thanks to inform me for malformed code. I have corrected formatting issue. You can now copy code to clip board easily. Let me know if you still have trouble copying code.

    Thanks

  4. Hi

    Thanks for making the changes.

    It looks like on line 17 still poses as a problem?

  5. Yes, you can remove . Thanks

  6. Awkens Ryder Says:

    It looks like on line 17 the website didn’t filter the post code since it has some raw HTML on it. “"
    Removing it solved the problem but now one persists.

    I entered: "Água do Lúso" and the returned string was: "n guaOdoOLn so"

  7. Awkens Ryder Says:

    PS: WordPress ate what I said between the first quotes.
    There was suposed to be there:

    LowerThan /code GreaterThan

  8. Thank you, this was very useful for turning strings into valid filenames.

  9. Thank you very much!! This code snippet helped me.

  10. Thanks a lot! This has solved my problem.
    What could I say “Bala Krishna ki jai”

  11. This is very useful

    thank you for share

  12. Very useful information.But whenever you use to explain codes, provide necessary examples.

  13. useful code ……

  14. thanks! i’m looking for this. when i scrape i always get those weird characters.

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