removing special characters

[ibinod]

hi,

 

how can i remove special characters like �♪♫

 

i tried htmlentities, htmlspecialchars but i can't fix it, pls let me know how

[RussellReal]

so what characters do you want to keep?

 

a-z, 0-9, !@#$%^&*() ;'.,[]{}":><|\~`

 

? a-z A-Z 0-9 all those symbols.. they are usually in succession, find out what their ascii values are and loop thru the text and remove anything thats not between those.. if you don't understand what I mean I'll help you out some more

[ibinod]

Hello RussellReal,

 

actually i m making a script to get news content from yahoo rss and along with it i am getting characters like those �♪♫ and making XHTML invalid,

so what's the best way to remove those and similar chars

 

and how do i loop through text to remove those,

 

thanx

[RussellReal]

Post some of your code.. where you handle the data you receive.. and I'll help you patch it in there

[ibinod]

 

//i have some text in the database like this

$string = "  �Public Enemy Number One� has long interested people who have then journeyed to visit his last resting place;

♪♫ Zac Efron & Jessica Alba WIN '07 Teen Choice Hottie Award";

 

// i have this function to remove un necessory tags (actually those are for urls)

function sef_rep($name)

{

$name = html_entity_decode(strtolower($name));

 

$remove = array("/", "'", "`", "!", "(", ")", ".", "@", "+", " ", "_", "<", ">", "?", ":", ";", "&", "#", ",");

$result_str = str_replace($remove, '-', $name);

return $result_str;

}

 

//so when i echo this those special characters haven't gone

echo sef_rep($string);

 

 

 

 

so pls post me a solution to remove special chars like �

[RussellReal]

<?php
function sef_rep($name) {
$name = html_entity_decode(strtolower($name));
$r = range(33,126);
$remove = array("/", "'", "`", "!", "(", ")", ".", "@", "+", " ", "_", "<", ">", "?", ":", ";", "&", "#", ",");
$name = str_replace($remove, '-', $name);
$l = strlen($name);
for ($i = 0; $i < $l; $i++) {
	$c = ord(substr($name,$i,0));
	if (!in_array($c,$r)) {
		$name = substr($name,0,$i - 1).substr($name,$i + 1,$l - ($i + 1));
		$i--;
	}
}
return $name;
}
?>

try that