Replacing International Symbols with Standard ASCII for Shopping Cart

[vozzek]

Hi all,

 

I've got a self-made php-based shopping cart that's working great, but I'm recently having trouble because I'm now allowing customers to enter international names and addresses.

 

My database allows the entry of special international characters (example:  í, è, ó, â, é, ñ, etc...), but when I try to pass these names and addresses through my payment gateway, my merchant provider kicks back an error.

 

I'd like to strip these characters and replace them with standard letters before sending the data through the gateway.  Are there any existing php routines that do this?  What's the best way you guys would recommend me handling the issue?

 

As always, thanks in advance for the help!

[vozzek]

Anyone have an idea?  Or a list of international symbols so I can do a string replace?

[JAY6390]

http://www.randomsequence.com/articles/removing-accented-utf-8-characters-with-php/

[vozzek]

Yikes!  Jay, that was astonishingly easy and helpful.  Thanks!

[JAY6390]

Don't thank me, thank google

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=how+to+replace+international+characters+php

[vozzek]

Hmmm...

 

Okay, I've modified the code slightly (I need to change variables, not the URL) and here's what I have:

 

<?php
$search = explode(",","ç,æ,œ,á,é,í,ó,ú,à,è,ì,ò,ù,ä,ë,ï,ö,ü,ÿ,â,ê,î,ô,û,å,e,i,ø,u");
$replace = explode(",","c,ae,oe,a,e,i,o,u,a,e,i,o,u,a,e,i,o,u,y,a,e,i,o,u,a,e,i,o,u");
$first_name = str_replace($search, $replace, $first_name);
$last_name = str_replace($search, $replace, $last_name);
$address_1 = str_replace($search, $replace, $address_1);
$address_2 = str_replace($search, $replace, $address_2);
$city = str_replace($search, $replace, $city);
?>

 

Admittedly I'm inexperienced with the whole explode thing, but this isn't working... the variables still contain the internation characters.  How come?