StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

POHow do I best remove the unicode characters that XHTML regards as non-valid using php?
text
Body
copied!<p>I run a forum designed to support an international mathematics group. I've recently switched it to unicode for better support of international characters. In debugging this conversion, I've discovered that not all unicode characters are considered as valid XHTML (the relevant website appears to be <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/unicode-xml/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.w3.org/TR/unicode-xml/</a>). One of the steps that the forum software goes through before presenting the posts to the browser is an XHTML validation/sanitisation step. It seems a reasonable idea that at that stage it should remove any unicode characters that XHTML doesn't like.</p> <p>So my question is:</p> <blockquote> <p>Is there a standard (or best) way of doing this in PHP?</p> </blockquote> <p>(The forum is written in PHP, by the way.)</p> <p>I guess that the failsafe would be a simple <code>str_replace</code> (if that's also the best, do I need to do anything extra to make sure it works properly with unicode?) but that would involve me having to go through the XHTML DTD (or the above-referenced W3 page) carefully to figure out what characters to list in the <em>search</em> part of <code>str_replace</code>, so if this is the best way, has someone already done that so that I can steal, err, copy, it?</p> <p>(Incidentally, the character that caused the problem was U+000C, the 'formfeed', which (according to the W3 page) is valid HTML but invalid XHTML!)</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload