remove invaild characters...

[kiwis]

I have a string which i'm putting into a XML file.. problem is my vb program which is reading it does not like some of the characters...

How can i remove anything which is not a-z or 0-9 ???

Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 3, position 123.

[kender]

$reg_exp = "[^A-Za-z0-9]"; // this searches for anything not A-Z, a-z, and 0-9
$string = $mystring['data']; // this is what you are searching through
$replace = ''; // this is what you are going to replace the special chars with

preg_replace($reg_exp, $replace, $string);

[kiwis]

I did this

$Body = iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE",$Body);