This function removes all NON ASCII characters, it's useful but not solving the question:
This is my function that always works, regardless of encoding:

function remove_bs($Str) {  
  $StrArr = str_split($Str); $NewStr = '';
  foreach ($StrArr as $Char) {    
    $CharNo = ord($Char);
    if ($CharNo == 163) { $NewStr .= $Char; continue; } // keep £ 
    if ($CharNo > 31 && $CharNo < 127) {
      $NewStr .= $Char;    
    }
  }  
  return $NewStr;
}

How it works:

echo remove_bs('Hello õhowå åare youÆ?'); // Hello how are you?

Hi There you can use simple regex

$text = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/', '', $text);

It would truncate all non UTF-8 characters from string

Welcome to 2019 and the /u modifier in regex which will handle UTF-8 multibyte chars for you

If you only use mb_convert_encoding($value, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8') you will still end up with non-printable chars in your string

This method will:

• Remove all invalid UTF-8 multibyte chars with mb_convert_encoding
• Remove all non-printable chars like \r, \x00 (NULL-byte) and other control chars with preg_replace

method:

function utf8_filter(string $value): string{
    return preg_replace('/[^[:print:]\n]/u', '', mb_convert_encoding($value, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8'));
}

[:print:] match all printable chars and \n newlines and strip everything else

You can see the ASCII table below.. The printable chars range from 32 to 127, but newline \n is a part of the control chars which range from 0 to 31 so we have to add newline to the regex /[^[:print:]\n]/u

You can try to send strings through the regex with chars outside the printable range like \x7F (DEL), \x1B (Esc) etc. and see how they are stripped

function utf8_filter(string $value): string{
    return preg_replace('/[^[:print:]\n]/u', '', mb_convert_encoding($value, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8'));
}

$arr = [
    'Danish chars'          => 'Hello from Denmark with æøå',
    'Non-printable chars'   => "\x7FHello with invalid chars\r \x00"
];

foreach($arr as $k => $v){
    echo "$k:\n---------\n";
    
    $len = strlen($v);
    echo "$v\n(".$len.")\n";
    
    $strip = utf8_decode(utf8_filter(utf8_encode($v)));
    $strip_len = strlen($strip);
    echo $strip."\n(".$strip_len.")\n\n";
    
    echo "Chars removed: ".($len - $strip_len)."\n\n\n";
}

https://www.tehplayground.com/q5sJ3FOddhv1atpR

substr() can break your multi-byte characters!

In my case, I was using substr($string, 0, 255) to ensure a user supplied value would fit in the database. On occasion it would split a multi-byte character in half and caused database errors with "Incorrect string value".

You could use mb_substr($string,0,255), and it might be ok for MySQL 5, but MySQL 4 counts bytes instead of characters, so it would still be too long depending on the number of multi-byte characters.

To prevent these issues I implemented the following steps:

1. I increased the size of the field (in this case it was a log of changes, so preventing the longer input was not an option.)
2. I still did a mb_substring in case it was still too long
3. I used the accepted answer above by @Markus Jarderot to ensure if there is a really long entry with a multi-byte character right at the length limit, that we can strip out the half of a multi-byte character at the end.

I tried many of the solutions presented on this topic, but non of them worked for me, in my specific case. But I found a good solution on this link: https://www.ryadel.com/en/php-skip-invalid-characters-utf-8-xml-file-string/

Basically, this is the function that solved for me:

function sanitizeXML($string)
{
    if (!empty($string)) 
    {
        // remove EOT+NOREP+EOX|EOT+<char> sequence (FatturaPA)
        $string = preg_replace('/(\x{0004}(?:\x{201A}|\x{FFFD})(?:\x{0003}|\x{0004}).)/u', '', $string);
 
        $regex = '/(
            [\xC0-\xC1] # Invalid UTF-8 Bytes
            | [\xF5-\xFF] # Invalid UTF-8 Bytes
            | \xE0[\x80-\x9F] # Overlong encoding of prior code point
            | \xF0[\x80-\x8F] # Overlong encoding of prior code point
            | [\xC2-\xDF](?![\x80-\xBF]) # Invalid UTF-8 Sequence Start
            | [\xE0-\xEF](?![\x80-\xBF]{2}) # Invalid UTF-8 Sequence Start
            | [\xF0-\xF4](?![\x80-\xBF]{3}) # Invalid UTF-8 Sequence Start
            | (?<=[\x0-\x7F\xF5-\xFF])[\x80-\xBF] # Invalid UTF-8 Sequence Middle
            | (?<![\xC2-\xDF]|[\xE0-\xEF]|[\xE0-\xEF][\x80-\xBF]|[\xF0-\xF4]|[\xF0-\xF4][\x80-\xBF]|[\xF0-\xF4][\x80-\xBF]{2})[\x80-\xBF] # Overlong Sequence
            | (?<=[\xE0-\xEF])[\x80-\xBF](?![\x80-\xBF]) # Short 3 byte sequence
            | (?<=[\xF0-\xF4])[\x80-\xBF](?![\x80-\xBF]{2}) # Short 4 byte sequence
            | (?<=[\xF0-\xF4][\x80-\xBF])[\x80-\xBF](?![\x80-\xBF]) # Short 4 byte sequence (2)
        )/x';
        $string = preg_replace($regex, '', $string);
 
        $result = "";
        $current;
        $length = strlen($string);
        for ($i=0; $i < $length; $i++)
        {
            $current = ord($string{$i});
            if (($current == 0x9) ||
                ($current == 0xA) ||
                ($current == 0xD) ||
                (($current >= 0x20) && ($current <= 0xD7FF)) ||
                (($current >= 0xE000) && ($current <= 0xFFFD)) ||
                (($current >= 0x10000) && ($current <= 0x10FFFF)))
            {
                $result .= chr($current);
            }
            else
            {
                $ret;    // use this to strip invalid character(s)
                // $ret .= " ";    // use this to replace them with spaces
            }
        }
        $string = $result;
    }
    return $string;
}

Hope it will help some of you.

Maybe not the most precise solution, but it gets the job done with a single line of code:

echo str_replace("?","",(utf8_decode($str)));

utf8_decode will convert the characters to a question mark;
str_replace will strip out the question marks.

static $preg = <<<'END'
%(
[\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E]
| [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]
| \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]
| [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}
| \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]
| \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}
| [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}
| \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}
)%xs
END;
if (preg_match_all($preg, $string, $match)) {
    $string = implode('', $match[0]);
} else {
    $string = '';
}

it work on our service

The next sanitizing works for me:

$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
$string = iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8//IGNORE", $string);