How to remove   from a UTF-8 string?

html-entities, php, utf-8

Solution

This gets tricky, its not as straight forward as replacing normal string.

Try this.

 str_replace("\xc2\xa0",' ',$str);

or this, the above should work:

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

@ref: https://moovwebconfluence.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1081435

Problem

My database is returning some strings like: `This&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;string` This is a problem when the string is long enough and you have maximum width set: ``` <p style="width:50px">This&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;string</p> ``` In order to get ride of `&nbsp;` entities I've tried to use the following filters without success: ``` $new = preg_replace("/&nbsp;/i", " ", $str); $new = str_replace('&nbsp;', ' ', $str); $new = html_entity_decode($str); ``` You have a PHP fiddle to see this in action (I've had to codify the string in hex from the database output; the string is in spanish, sorry). How to deal with this? Why `html_entity_decode()` is not working? And what about the replace functions? Thanks.

Original source