PHP upload and extra characters in Word doc

[themistral]

Hi all,

New forum member here!

I have a question that is holding my development up - and it's down to Microsoft!

I am developing a site where users upload documents (using php upload), and the content of the uploaded file is inserted into a mysql database.
It all works fine - apart from the hundreds of extra characters added by Microsoft Word, above and below the content.

We do not want to restrict the doc type on upload as there will be many different formats used and we want to make it as easy for the user as possible.

Most solutions I have seen simply say to save the Word file as a .txt file - this is not an option. We MUST be able to upload many different types of Word processing files and strip out the extra characters.

Hope that all makes sense!

PLEASE help me someone!

[reddrum]

I learned this form NogDog, you can add any unwanted char code to the preg_replace function like this:

$string = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x20\x7f-\x9f]/', '', $string);

[themistral]

Thanks reddrum!

That's not really the solution for me as I don't know what characters will be used in the user's documents - I don't want to risk deleting valid text.

Thanks for your time though!

Does anyone have any other ideas?