title: How to strip unicode chars (LEFT_TO_RIGHT_MARK) from a string in php
body: <p>I'm trying to remove LEFT-TO-RIGHT-MARK (\u200e) and RIGHT-TO-LEFT-MARK (\u200f) from a string before encoding it as JSON. Neither of the following seems to work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$s = mb_ereg_replace("\u200e", '', $s);
  $s = preg_replace("#\u200e#u", '', $s);
  $s = preg_replace("#\u200e#", '', $s);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any help is appreciated!</p>