I have been working on a PHP cotract recently and I needed to strip out anything non-asci.

Here’s a little function I wrote that takes a string and returns it minus all the crazy symbols:

// Function to strip out all non asci characters
function strip_utf($string) {
  for ($i = 0; $i < strlen ($string); $i++)
    if (ord($string[$i]) > 127)
      $string[$i] = " ";
  return $string;
}

Hope it helps, Dave.