[FIXED] How to remove special characters and keep letters of any language in PHP?

Issue

I know this should remove any characters from string and keep only numbers and ENGLISH letters.

$txtafter = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z 0-9]+/","",$txtbefore);

but I wish to remove any special characters and keep any letter of any language like Arabic or Japanese.

Solution

Probably this will work for you:

$repl = preg_replace('/[^\w\s]+/u','' ,$txtbefore);

This will remove all non-word and non-space characters from your text. /u flag is there for unicode support.

Answered By - anubhava

Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (PHPFixing Admin)