How to cut out such characters?

Question

PHP

I don’t know for sure whether it will show here or not, in general, there is a symbol between the letters a and b:
ab
Twitter swears at him. Most likely it came from some doc-document.
So far, I just made a cut through str_replace, but maybe there is something more correct?
Maybe there is a way to cut out such garbage?
before showing, use html_entity_decode and htmlspecialchars

Answer 1

This is a zero-width non-breaking space that is also used as a BOM tag.
www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/feff/index.htm
It's not quite clear which characters you are going to strip. There are quite a lot of invisible and difficult to distinguish characters, it is usually easier to leave the "correct" ones, deleting everything else.