Replace within string problem

[NickAlbert]

$string = 'Vapes – Cookie – 3ml – 6g';
$nameafter = str_replace('–','-',$string);
echo $nameafter;

Need it to output:
Vapes - Cookie - 3ml - 6g

Instead it keeps outputing:
Vapes – Cookie – 3ml – 6g

What am I missing?

[Jacques1]

So what's the actual goal here? To get rid of the strange looking characters in the original string?

 

The problem is that your character encoding is messed up. The original string is encoded with UTF-8 (a multibyte Unicode encoding) and contains several Unicode dashes. But your application misinterprets the string as ISO 8859-1 data (a single byte encoding) and displays each multibyte character as a sequence of multiple nonsense characters.

 

To fix the problem, you need to make your application use UTF-8 all the way, including the database, the database connection, the HTML document and possibly other components.