wc_remove_non_displayable_chars() │ WC 9.9.0

Removes useless non-displayable and problematic Unicode characters from a string.

This function eliminates characters that can cause formatting issues, invisible text, or unexpected behavior in copy-pasted text. Specifically, it removes:

• Soft hyphen (U+00AD) – Invisible unless text is broken across lines.
• Zero-width spaces & joiners (U+200B–U+200D) – Invisible and can cause copy/paste issues.
• Directional markers (U+200E–U+200F, U+202A–U+202E) – Can affect text rendering.
• Byte Order Mark (BOM) (U+FEFF) – Can interfere with encoding.
• Interlinear annotation characters (U+FFF9–U+FFFB) – Rarely used and unnecessary in checkout fields.

It does not remove:

• Non-breaking space (U+00A0) – Useful for preventing line breaks in addresses.
• Word joiner (U+2060) – Sometimes needed for proper text rendering in certain scripts.

No Hooks.

Returns

String. The sanitized string without problematic characters.

Usage

wc_remove_non_displayable_chars( $raw_value ): string;

$raw_value(string) (required)

The input string to sanitize.

Changelog

wc_remove_non_displayable_chars() wc remove non displayable chars code ^{WC 10.4.3}

function wc_remove_non_displayable_chars( string $raw_value ): string {
	$remove_chars = array(
		"\u{00AD}", // Soft Hyphen.
		"\u{200B}", // Zero Width Space.
		"\u{200C}", // Zero Width Non-Joiner.
		"\u{200D}", // Zero Width Joiner.
		"\u{200E}", // Left-to-Right Mark.
		"\u{200F}", // Right-to-Left Mark.
		"\u{202A}", // Left-to-Right Embedding.
		"\u{202B}", // Right-to-Left Embedding.
		"\u{202C}", // Pop Directional Formatting.
		"\u{202D}", // Left-to-Right Override.
		"\u{202E}", // Right-to-Left Override.
		"\u{FEFF}", // Byte Order Mark (BOM).
		"\u{FFF9}", // Interlinear Annotation Anchor.
		"\u{FFFA}", // Interlinear Annotation Separator.
		"\u{FFFB}", // Interlinear Annotation Terminator.
	);

	return str_replace( $remove_chars, '', $raw_value );
}