When we dealing with the user data may be from any of the website or from csv or excel style sheet some non utf-8 special characters will get added up with normal characters. To handle this situation PHP has a inbuilt function which we called as iconv.. Actually its a very huge library having different functions, but here we will we see a simple and easy example which will help you to remove the special character in your data.

Examples - To remove special character with php

$input = "Fóø Bår Zacarías ?S?B?D Ferreíra"; // original text
 
$output = iconv("utf-8", "ascii//TRANSLIT//IGNORE", $input);
 
$output =  preg_replace("/^'|[^A-Za-z0-9\s-]|'$/", '', $output); // lets remove utf-8 special characters except blank spaces
 
echo $output;

Output

Foo Bar Zacarias ASABAD Ferreira

References

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

By Thirumani Raj posted on - 23rd Apr 2016