Regular expression change the text, when it shouldnt - php

Question

This is very strange and i cant find something similar on the internet.
I got a table of strings in greek characters that contains alot of special chars, so i wanted to remove 'em.
function clean($string) {
$string = preg_replace('/([$#!\?!\+\#\%\^\*\[\]\<\>\;\:\'\"\`\~\,\?\_\=\«\»])+/', ' ' ,$string);
$string = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ',$string);
return $string;
}
$prok=clean($row['name']);
echo $row['name'].'-'.$prok;
This is working ok except when the character Π is inside the string.
If so the Π is replace with a questionmark.
Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be ??

Answer 1

You can try using mb_ereg_replace to support multibyte:
function clean($string) {
$string = mb_ereg_replace('/([$#!\?!\+\#\%\^\*\[\]\<\>\;\:\'\"\`\~\,\?\_\=\«\»])+/', ' ' ,$string);
$string = mb_ereg_replace('/\s+/', ' ',$string);
return $string;
}
$prok=clean($row['name']);
echo $row['name'].'-'.$prok;
Or use the /u modifier for unicode strings:
function clean($string) {
$string = preg_replace('/([$#!\?!\+\#\%\^\*\[\]\<\>\;\:\'\"\`\~\,\?\_\=\«\»])+/u', ' ' ,$string);
$string = preg_replace('/\s+/u', ' ',$string);
return $string;
}
$prok=clean($row['name']);
echo $row['name'].'-'.$prok;