// Replace unreadable characters from the description (e.g.  )
$string = utf8_decode($full_event_desc);
$string = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $string);    // ignore non UTF-8 characters
$temp = utf8_decode('Â');
$string = str_replace($temp, '', $string);   // replace  character with a space
$string = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_ %\[\]\.\(\)%&-]/s', ' ', $string);  // regular expression