removing strange characters from php string

Question

this is what i have right now

Drawing an RSS feed into the php, the raw xml from the rss feed reads:

Paul’s Confidence 

The php that i have so far is this.

$newtitle = $item->title; $newtitle = utf8_decode($newtitle); 

The above returns;

Paul?s Confidence 

If i remove the utf_decode, i get this

Paul’s Confidence 

When i try a str_replace;

$newtitle = str_replace("”", "", $newtitle); 

It doesnt work, i get;

Paul’s Confidence 

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

This is my function that always works, regardless of encoding:

function RemoveBS($Str) {     $StrArr = str_split($Str); $NewStr = '';   foreach ($StrArr as $Char) {         $CharNo = ord($Char);     if ($CharNo == 163) { $NewStr .= $Char; continue; } // keep £      if ($CharNo > 31 && $CharNo < 127) {       $NewStr .= $Char;         }   }     return $NewStr; } 

How it works:

echo RemoveBS('Hello õhowå åare youÆ?'); // Hello how are you? 

Answer 2

Try this:

$newtitle = html_entity_decode($newtitle, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8") 

If this is not the solution browse this page http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php