Weird dash character in PHP

Question

I have a weird dash in my text, which isn't being detected in a str_replace.

Here is an example:

Sun: 10:00 – 3:00pm

I don't know if the dash will show up on here.. but when it is inserted into my table, it is like a square box with the characters 0096

It looks a lot like an – - when viewing the source, there is no special characters, just the dash.

str_replace('–', '', $var);

The above replace doesn't seem to catch it, has anyone else had this trouble before?

Answer 1

That's an en dash. In php, the most portable way to get it is with html_entity_decode:

$endash = html_entity_decode('–', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
echo str_replace($endash, '(en dash)', 'Sun: 10:00 – 3:00pm');

Note that this only works if your website encoding is UTF-8 and your editor encoding(or the encoding of the third argument to str_replace) is as well. If you use another encoding (and you should use the same both for website and editor), replace the third parameter of html_entity_decode with its name.