How to replace or strip out ndash character from a string?

Question

The problem looks simple, but it's taking time to figure out. I need to get rid of ndash characters from some strings in a project. Not the HTML entity –, but the actual character ( – ). Using str_replace() and preg_replace() didn't work.

Already tried:

$new_str = str_replace('–', '', $str_with_ndash_char);     

Also tried:

$new_str = preg_replace('/–/', '', $str_with_ndash_char);  

Also, it's a legacy project. Some parts of it are iso-8859-1 encoded, and a few others are utf-8 encoded. I noticed that my editor (Komodo Edit) complains about the ndash character when a PHP file is iso-8859-1, losing the character when I save the file, like this:

$new_str = str_replace('?', '', $str_with_ndash_char);

Converting everything to utf-8 results in a lot of garbage characters (same for the other way around, converting everything to iso-8859-1), so I'm avoiding doing it unless it's really, really necessary.

Edited: removed double $ signs (bad CTRL+V).

Answer 1

I just tried out what you are doing and worked just fine, make sure that is is n-dashed in the string and not em-dashes.

I tried replacing both the different types and found no issues.

$str = str_replace('—', '', '–test—');   
echo $str . '</br>';
$str = str_replace('–', '', $str);     
echo $str;

This gives me the result:

-test
test

Some more concrete example would be nice as well. Like the strings you are trying to change and not just the variables.

Answer 2

It seems that error is in redundant $ sign. It should be exactly one dollar sign in a variable.
So the line $new_str = str_replace('–', '', $str_with_ndash_char); should work fine.

But if it all OK in code in your project, the you should check out this answer

Also, try to switch error reportin mode to E_ALL. Place error_reporting(E_ALL); on the top of your script