Remove Non English Characters PHP

Question

how can i parse a string to remove all non english characters in php

right now I want to remove things like

სოფო ნი�

Thanks :)

Answer 1

$str = preg_replace('/[^\00-\255]+/u', '', $str);

Answer 2

Your best option would be using iconv, which converts strings to requested character encoding.

iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT',  $yourtext);

with //translit you get a meaningful conversion to ASCII (e.g. ß -> ss). Using //IGNORE will strip non-ascii characters altogether.

iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//IGNORE',  $yourtext);

See http://php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

Answer 3

By using preg_replace()

$string = "some სოფო text"; 
$string = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9_ ]/i', '', $string); 

echo $string;

Granted, you will need to expand the preg_replace pattern, but that is one way to do it. There is probably a better way, I just do not know it.