Cannot replace £ with £ from string

Question

I have a HTML string containing £ signs, for some reason i'm not able to replace them. I'm assuming this is an encoding issue although i can't work out how. The site is using ISO-8859-1 for its encoding

$str = '<span class="price">£89.99</span>';
var_dump(mb_detect_encoding($str, 'ISO-8859-1', true)); // outputs ISO-8859-1

echo str_replace(array("£","&pound;"),"",$str); // nothing is removed

echo htmlentities($str); // the entire string is converted, including £ to &pound;

Any ideas?

EDIT

should have pointed out i want to replace the £ with &pound; - i had temporarily added &pound to the array of items to replace in case it had already been converted

Everything ok here: `string(10) "ISO-8859-1" 89.99<span class="price">Â£89.99</span>` — samura, Nov 22 '11 at 13:44
i appreciate it *should* work :) i guess my question should have been, why would this not work?! — robjmills, Nov 22 '11 at 13:45
I just copied and pasted the code you gave, the £ sign is removed on the 3rd line of code. — Nick, Nov 22 '11 at 13:46
Check var_dump(mb_detect_encoding("£", 'ISO-8859-1', true)); — PiTheNumber, Nov 22 '11 at 13:46

Ivan · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-07T09:37:47.760

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Just a guess but could it be that even thou your website outputs in ISO-8859-1 encoding, your actual *.php files are saved as utf-8? i don't think that str_replace works correctly with utf-8 strings. To test it try:

str_replace(utf8_decode("£"),"&pound;",utf8_decode($str));

Yeah, if this works then your *.php files are saved in utf-8 encoding. This means all the string constants are in utf-8. It's probably worth switching default encoding in your IDE to ISO-8859-1

edited Dec 07 '12 at 09:37

answered Nov 22 '11 at 13:45

Ivan

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That is my guess to. Check the encoding of "£". – PiTheNumber Nov 22 '11 at 13:48
I must point out i have no idea how and why this works though – robjmills Nov 22 '11 at 13:58
@seengee your IDE or text editor saves *.php files in utf-8 encoding. When PHP reads the strings in your source code it reads them in the same utf-8 encoding. PHP5 doesn't have full unicode support so some functionality is flawed. Changing settings in your text-editor/IDE to save your source code in ISO-8859-1 encoding will prevent this problems, and you will not need to use utf8_decode() – Ivan Nov 22 '11 at 14:03
@Ivan - i have never even thought of changing that in Netbeans, you're right though. switching to ISO in the Netbeans settings means a standard str_replace works! – robjmills Nov 22 '11 at 14:10

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '11 at 13:45

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html_entity_decode(str_replace("&pound;", "", htmlentities($str)));

answered Nov 22 '11 at 13:45

Jan Vorcak

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oops, should have pointed out i want to replace the £ with £ – robjmills Nov 22 '11 at 13:46
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@seengee then just use htmlentities($str); from Jan's answer – SERPRO Nov 22 '11 at 13:48

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 06 '17 at 12:17

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$data = str_replace("£","&pound;",utf8_encode($data));
echo $data;

edited Nov 06 '17 at 12:17

Damien Overeem

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answered Nov 06 '17 at 09:00

him

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While this code may answer the question, providing additional context regarding how and/or why it solves the problem would improve the answer's long-term value. – mx0 Nov 06 '17 at 09:56

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 22 '11 at 13:49

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$str = '<span class="price">£89.99</span>';
echo str_replace("£","&pound;",$str);

Output:

<span class="price">&pound;89.99</span>

answered Nov 22 '11 at 13:49

Phill Pafford

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i know that should work, thats where the question comes from! See my note in Ivan's answer for the solution – robjmills Nov 22 '11 at 13:54

Cannot replace £ with £ from string

4 Answers4