Remove the following characters ½ ´ ¤ £ € ¨ using php but without using preg_replace or str_replace functions

Question

I have a problem that needs to be solved. I can't use preg_replace or str_replace because we can't predetermine the characters since the data comes from form input.

I am trying to remove these characters from this $name "Test ½ ´ ¤ £ € ¨" ##½ ´ ¤ £ € ¨；

The same is true for the front end, the characters cannot be predetermined

I tried the following methods but none of them worked

$name = "Test ½ ´ ¤ £ € ¨";

mb_convert_encoding(strval($name);

utf8_decode(strval($name);

My ideal output is

Test

Answer 1

You can always iterate over the characters in a string. But be careful: PHP does not support Unicode natively.

$remove = array( '½', '´', '¤', '£', '€' );
$result = '';
$name = "Test ½ ´ ¤ £ € ¨";

$count = mb_strlen($name, 'UTF-8');
for( $i = 0; $i < $count; $i++ ){
    $char = mb_substr( $name, $i, 1, 'UTF-8' );
    if( ! in_array( $char, $remove ) {
      $result .= $char;
    }
}

This iterates over the multibyte characters in the user-supplied string and allows you to perform any operation on them. The example builds a resulting string, omitting the characters you mentioned. (Not debugged, sorry.)

(IMHO, I think your reasons for avoiding string replacement functions are probably wrong. The benefit of using regex character classes is this: regex authors have solved a lot of weird edge cases where Unicode contains many disturbing situations.)