PHP replace special characters from a string

Question

I have clean function for remove special caracter from string but that function also removing Turkish caracter (ı,ğ,ş,ç,ö) from string

function clean($string) {
   $string = str_replace(' ', ' ', $string); 
   $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-]/', ' ', $string); 

   return preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $string); 
}

How can I fix it ?

Answer 1

Add those characters you want to keep to preg, also add Upper cases if neededç I edited your code:

function clean($string) {
    $string = str_replace(' ', ' ', $string);
    $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-ığşçöüÖÇŞİıĞ]/', ' ', $string);

    return preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $string);
}

Test:

$str='Merhaba=Türkiye 12345 çok çalış another one ! *, !@_';
var_dump(clean($str));
//Output: string(57) "Merhaba Türkiye 12345 çok çalış another one   "

Answer 2

Maybe you can try:

function clean($string) {
   $string = str_replace(' ', ' ', $string); 
   $string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9ĞİŞığşçö\-]/', ' ', $string); 

   return preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $string); 
}

Answer 3

Which special characters you want to replace? Maybe be it'll be easier to change a paradigm of cleaning from everything except ... to something concrete.

<?php

function garbagereplace($string) {

$garbagearray = array('@','#','$','%','^','&','*');
$garbagecount = count($garbagearray);
for ($i=0; $i<$garbagecount; $i++) {
$string = str_replace($garbagearray[$i], '-', $string);
}

return $string;
}

echo garbagereplace('text@#$text%^&*text');

?>

Answer 4

You can use iconv to replacing special characters like à->a, è->e

<?php
    $string = "ʿABBĀSĀBĀD";
    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $string);
    // output: [nothing, and you get a notice]
    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//IGNORE', $string);
    // output: ABBSBD
    echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $string);
    // output: ABBASABAD
    // Yay! That's what I wanted!
    ?>

Credits:

https://gist.github.com/swas/10643194

@dmp y @Nisse Engström