Replace é with e in PHP

Question

Hey, this is my first post on stackoverflow.

I'm trying to replace é with e and other similar special characters. I've tried str_replace() and converting it from UTF-8 to ASCII but nothing seems to work. When I convert it from UTF-8 to anything it just drops the é off. When I use str_replace() it never catches it and the é is still there.

I have a feeling something is wrong internally on our server because my friend tried str_replace() on his server and it worked fine.

Thanks,

Jason Tolhurst

Answer 1

$string = iconv('utf-8','ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT',$string);

Answer 2

You can use htmlentities() to convert é to é and then use a regex to pull out the first character after an ampersand.

function RemoveAccents($string) {
    // From http://theserverpages.com/php/manual/en/function.str-replace.php
    $string = htmlentities($string);
    return preg_replace("/&([a-z])[a-z]+;/i", "$1", $string);
}