Why won't my substr call work with the → character? - php

Question

I'm building a WooCommerce site for a client using WordPress at the moment and I've written a piece of code that dynamically generates tables with products and product attributes in them. When I call the get_title() method, it gives me a title with the product's parent product first, the "→" sign, then the actual title of the product. I wrote this code to remove the "→" sign and everything before it.
$name_raw = $product->get_title();
$name = substr($name_raw, ($pos = strpos($name_raw, '→')) !== false ? $pos + 1 : 0);
It used to work perfectly, but not anymore. This code also works perfectly with every other character I've put in to test it, but not with that stupid little arrow. It seems like a recent update to something I'm using must've removed this method's ability to handle non-conventional characters. Can anyone recommend any possible solutions?

Answer 1

Since it's a WP environment title, the right arrow character probably has been entered using the WP form for a post. I think this character would be converted to it's HTML code, one of these:
→
→
→
→
→
→
→
So I'd do something like this:
function no_right_arrow_name($name_raw) {
if (empty($name_raw))
return $name_raw;
$right_arrows = array(
'→',
'→',
'→',
'→',
'→',
'→',
'→'
);
$name_new = $name_raw;
// removes all possible combinations of right arrows
foreach ($right_arrows as $right_arrow)
$name_new = str_replace($right_arrow, '', $name_new);
return $name_new;
}
$name_raw = $product->get_title();
$name = no_right_arrow_name($name_raw);