PHP and accent characters (Ba\u015f\u00e7\u0131l)

Question

I have a string like so "Ba\u015f\u00e7\u0131l". I'm assuming those are some special accent characters. How do I:

1) Display the string with the accents (i.e replace code with actual character)

2) What is best practice for storing strings like this?

2) If I don't want to allow such characters, how do I replace it with "normal characters"?

Answer 1

My educated guess is that you obtained such values from a JSON string. If that's the case, you should properly decode the full piece of data with json_decode():

<?php

header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');

$data = '"Ba\u015f\u00e7\u0131l"';
var_dump( json_decode($data) );

?>

Answer 2

1. To display the characters look at How to decode Unicode escape sequences like "\u00ed" to proper UTF-8 encoded characters?

2. You can store the character like that, or decoded, just make sure your storage can handle the UTF8 charset.

3. Use iconv with the translit flag.

Here's an example...

function replace_unicode_escape_sequence($match) {
    return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2BE');
}
$str = preg_replace_callback('/\\\\u([0-9a-f]{4})/i', 'replace_unicode_escape_sequence', $str);

echo $str;

echo '<br/>';
$str = iconv('UTF8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str);

echo $str;