replace special characters in a string in PHP using regex except certain chars

Question

I would like to replace all special characters in a string except space and -.

For example,

Hello-my näme *is (Jämes93!

to

Hello-my name is James93

or even

Hello-my nme is Jmes93

I have the following but it won't work. Pls can someone help? Thanks

preg_replace('#[^\w-]#',"",$string)

Answer 1

You don't want to use regex for these. You are much better off using iconv() with transliteration:

$result = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);

This assumes that original string is encoded in UTF-8 and you want to convert it to ASCII which comes close to your question.

You can convert to/from other charsets the same way just as long as you know the original charset.

By the way, you can't do that with preg_replace, it does not support transliteration.