Removing & and Special Characters

[kicks66]

I have the following values:

 

The Iskelé 
Jones & Sons 
 

I am trying to remove any special characters (namely the &). Using str_replace with '&' gives me the following:

 

The Iskelé 
Jones #038; Sons 
 

When in reality I would like to get:

 

The Iskele
Jones Sons 

 

What conversions do I need to do in order to achieve this?

[denno020]

How are you using str_replace?

 

str_replace(' & ', ' ', $variable);

 

Should do the job fine.. Grabbing the space from either side of the & symbol and replacing with 1 space will fix a problem if you simply find the & symbol and replace it with nothing.

[Ch0cu3r]

 

Using str_replace with '&' gives me the following:

 

The Iskelé 

Jones #038; Sons 

If you are getting that result then & symbols have most likely been html encoded to   &  

 

In which case you'll need use str_replace with & instead

$text = str_replace('&', '', $text);

Or use html_entity_decode prior to str_replace and then apply htmlentities again afterwards

[ginerjm]

Just to point out - changing something from "Jones & Sons" to "Jones Sons" really makes for a confusing expression.  If I named my company as such I wouldn't like to see it changed to something with less meaning/identity.