CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpunicode
Ehsan
Ehsan

Reputation: 2285

Remove or replace a ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character

I want to remove ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character from a string but using str_replace wasn't useful.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4450

Answers (2)

Jordan Mack
Jordan Mack

Reputation: 8743

str_replace will do what you want, but PHP does not have very good native support for Unicode. The following will do what you ask. json_decode has been used to get the Unicode char, since PHP does not support the \u syntax.

<?php
$unicodeChar = json_decode('"\u200c"');
$string = 'blah'.$unicodeChar.'blah';
echo str_replace($unicodeChar, '', $string);
?>

edit: While my method works, I would suggest you use fiskfisk's solution. It is less hacky than using json_decode.

Upvotes: 0

MatsLindh
MatsLindh

Reputation: 52872

str_replace should solves this, as long as you're careful with what you're replacing.

// \xE2\x80\x8C is ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
$foo = "foo\xE2\x80\x8Cbar";

print($foo . " - " . strlen($foo) . "\n");
$foo = str_replace("\xE2\x80\x8C", "", $foo);
print($foo . " - " . strlen($foo) . "\n");

Outputs as expected:

foo‌bar - 9
foobar - 6

Upvotes: 7

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