PHP trim and space not working

Question

I have some data imported from a csv. The import script grabs all email addresses in the csv and after validating them, imports them into a db.

A client has supplied this csv, and some of the emails seem to have a space at the end of the cell. No problem, trim that sucker off... nope, wont work.

The space seems to not be a space, and isn't being removed so is failing a bunch of the emails validation.

Question: Any way I can actually detect what this erroneous character is, and how I can remove it?

Not sure if its some funky encoding, or something else going on, but I dont fancy going through and removing them all manually! If I UTF-8 encode the string first it shows this character as a:

Â

Answer 1

If that "space" is not affected by trim(), the first step is to identify it.

Use urlencode() on the string. Urlencode will percent-escape any non-printable and a lot of printable characters besides ASCII, so you will see the hexcode of the offending characters instantly. Depending on what you discover, you can act accordingly or update your question to get additional help.