Scanning a string for invalid characters

Such as Ð or Ô

[Karma]

Hi all,

Does anyone know a way of scanning a string to find invalid characters such as Ð or Ô and return a true or false?

I thought it was the "htmlentities" function, but all that does is convert invalid characters to the ascii code.

Many thanks, would be great if someone knows the answer!

[henry0]

Do you know what valid chars are or none valid chars are?
If so throw the valid in a regex and check the string against it.
Remember that it is usually easier to define what is allowed VS defining the reverse.
Make it a function that will return true or false so you may easily reuse it across your scripts.
You could also use eregi() to check against disallowed

[HoboTraveler]

Just create a function that takes a string and checks it for a-z characters. If it contains anything other than a-z, return false!

[edited by: HoboTraveler at 6:24 pm (utc) on April 26, 2007]

[Karma]

Ok, maybe I should explain the problem a little further...

I am selecting records from a MySQL database:

$query = "SELECT column1,column2,column3 FROM $my_database WHERE character='D'";

As expected, this picks up all records that have 'D' in the character column, however, it also picks up all records that have '�' in the character column.

Character set problem maybe? (Currently set to 'latin1')

?

[edited by: Karma at 10:26 pm (utc) on April 26, 2007]

[Karma]

FYI, I changed the character column encoding from latin1 to UTF-8 and the problem has now been resolved.