How to use UTF-8 characters in a PHP-script?

Question

How to use UTF-8 characters in a PHP-script?

I know there is an escape character to interpret the next two characters as UTF-8. That escape is \s. So \xFF works, which will represent 'ÿ'. But now I want to remove zero-width spaces (U+200B) from a string. How to do that? Can I use the function str_replace(), or maybe preg_replace()?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This worked for me:

$str = str_replace("\xe2\x80\x8b", '', $str);

Sources:

• http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200b/index.htm
• http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?start=8192&number=128&utf8=string-literal