PHP remove non standard characters

I have text with alot of non-standard characters and they are stored like this in database: ΓΓÇôΓÇ₧ΓΓÇ&开发者_StackOverflow#244;ΓÇ₧

Is there a way to filter them or replace them with nothing?

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I would use a regular expression

echo preg_replace("/&#\\d+;/", "", $textWithWeirdCharacters);

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Make an array with the non-standard characters you don't want. And then apply next code to it.

<?php
$blockChars = array('&#915', '...');
$string = str_replace($block, array_fill(0, count($blockChars), ''), $string);
?>