php squares[]appear instead of spaces for excel sheets

I am working on an excel sheet import. It imports the sheet perfectly fine, but it seems like all of the spaces are squares [] empty[]hollow[]squares. I've used $mystring = str_replace('�', ' ', $mystring); to replace it with a space, but it doesn't seem to work. It is interesting that here the square appears as a diamond with a ? in it.

Sure I could remove all of the spaces from the excel sheet, but that wouldn't solve the overall problem.

Any help is much appreciated. I've looked on other forums and found nothing.

Hi,

could be something like nonbreakable space instead of real space.
If you do not expect umlaut or accent characters, you could try

Code:

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ereg_replace('[\200-\377]', ' ', $mystring)

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to turn every unexpected char into a space

Musicman

Thank you so much for the help, but unfortunately it kept the [] and removed the capitolized letters and word. I don't know what's wrong with this. Maybe its an Excel 2010 csv export fault.