Laravel Replace Unicode Characters in Database - development

Laravel Replace Unicode Characters in Database

I stored some hours from Google Places and little did I know it brought in some longer dashes (u2013) and I’d like to loop through and convert anything in the database that is a unicode string into a normal string, as when I retrieve these hours I can’t explode them via

explode(' - ', $hours);

What’s the best way to do this in Laravel/MySQL/PHP?

from Laravel Questions and Answers https://laravelquestions.com/php/laravel-replace-unicode-characters-in-database/
via Lzo Media