How to remove all occurrences of c2a0 in a string with PHP?

csv, php, utf-8

Solution

$column = str_replace("\xc2\xa0", '', $column);

Problem

I'm working with a CSV file which is exported from Excel. I have a column that contains a value of 1 234,00. I need to get all whitespaces away from these kinds of columns with PHP and I've tried to do it with `preg_replace("/\s*/","",$column)` as well as with `str_replace(" ","",$column)`. I was almost ready to lose it so I took a glance into the csv-file with a HEX-editor and noticed, that this space consist of two hex values, C2 and A0 which seems to be UTF-8 non-breaking space. But I suck with encoding stuff and I'm still confused in finding a way to remove them. Any ideas?

Original source