preg_replace degree and phi symobols

Question

I've tried in many ways to replace ONLY degree and (greek)Phi symbols. I've googled and did everything the articles said to do, it's driving me crazy. I can't use htmlentities() because I don't want to encode the html tags... just those two characters, I do this... it doesn't return an error, just replaces the entire string with nothing

preg_replace(array('/( )+/', '/\x{00B0}/u', '/\x{03A6}/u', '/\x{03D5}/u'), array(' ','°','Φ','Φ'), $str);

By The Way, the first replace just gets rid of extra white space and that works fantastic, but when I add in the other three (degree, capital Phi and lowercase Phi), the entire string gets replaced with white space.

Answer 1

It appears your code is working as expected

Live Demo

Example

Code

<?php

$string = 'hi ϕllip       it is 900°';

$output = preg_replace(array('/( )+/', '/\x{00B0}/u', '/\x{03A6}/u', '/\x{03D5}/u'), array(' ','&deg;','&Phi;','&Phi;'), $string );


    echo "this is the output:"  . $output;

Output

this is the output:hi Φllip it is 900°