PHP Parsing Problem -   and Â

Question

When I try to parse some html that has   sprinkled through it and then echo it, the   "turns into" this character: Â. Also, html_entity_decode() and str_replace() doesn't change it.

Why is this happening? How can I remove the Â's?

Solution 1

The non-breaking space exist in UTF-8 of two bytes: 0xC2 and 0xA0.

When those bytes are represented in ISO-8859-1 (a single-byte encoding) instead of UTF-8 (a multi-byte encoding) then those bytes becomes respectively the characters Â and another non-breaking space .

Apparently you're parsing the HTML using UTF-8 and echoing the results using ISO-8859-1. To fix this problem, you need to either parse HTML using ISO-8859-1 or echo the results using UTF-8. I'd recommend to use UTF-8 all the way. Go through the PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet to align it all out.

Solution 2

preg_replace() can also do the trick:

preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]{2,8};/i","", $var);

Solution 3

html_entity_decode(" ") == '\xa0'

I think by design, I don't understand why str_replace does not work for you, try this snippet:

$nbsp = html_entity_decode(" ");
$s = html_entity_decode("[ ]");
$s = str_replace($nbsp, " ", $s);
echo $s;

perhaps \xa0 it's not a valid unicode string, so using the result of the html_entity_decode() may be more appropriate for text replacement instead of \xa0.

BalusC explanation looks plausible you may trying to insert utf-8 \xc2\xa0 in the the then trying to display it as latin instead of utf8, if you want to use unicode stuff you should keep utf-8 encoding everywhere, from the charset of the server to the db, since you will have the same problem when using e.g. à