clean special characters or garbage characters from string to UTF-8 encoding

readme

this function will convert distorted text or charactors to UTF-8 Encoding

clean-special-characters-or-garbage-characters-from-string.php

function cleanString($text) {
    $utf8 = array(
        '/[áàâãªä]/u'   =>   'a',
        '/[ÁÀÂÃÄ]/u'    =>   'A',
        '/[ÍÌÎÏ]/u'     =>   'I',
        '/[íìîï]/u'     =>   'i',
        '/[éèêë]/u'     =>   'e',
        '/[ÉÈÊË]/u'     =>   'E',
        '/[óòôõºö]/u'   =>   'o',
        '/[ÓÒÔÕÖ]/u'    =>   'O',
        '/[úùûü]/u'     =>   'u',
        '/[ÚÙÛÜ]/u'     =>   'U',
        '/ç/'           =>   'c',
        '/Ç/'           =>   'C',
        '/ñ/'           =>   'n',
        '/Ñ/'           =>   'N',
        '/–/'           =>   '-', // UTF-8 hyphen to "normal" hyphen
        '/[’‘‹›‚]/u'    =>   ' ', // Literally a single quote
        '/[“”«»„]/u'    =>   ' ', // Double quote
        '/ /'           =>   ' ', // nonbreaking space (equiv. to 0x160)
    );
    return preg_replace(array_keys($utf8), array_values($utf8), $text);
}