Custom Full-text Search Against Stopwords And Special Characters Using PHP And Mysql

I'm not sure if this is the best way.
To clean I pass the data through this class, all it does is strip out any special characters, and a list of stop words that I don't want to include in searches:

<?php 
class Cleaner {

    var $stopwords = array(" find ", " about ", " me ", " ever ", " each ", " update ", " delete ", " add ", " insert ",
 " where ", " i ", " a ", " my ");//you need to extend this big time.

    var $symbols = array('/','\\','\'','"',',','.','<','>','?',';',':','[',']','{','}','|','=','+',
'-','_',')','(','*','&','^','%','$','#','@','!','~','`');

    function parseString($string) {
        $string = ' '.$string.' ';
        $string = $this->removeStopwords($string);
        $string = $this->removeSymbols($string);
        return $string;
    }

    function removeStopwords($string) {
        for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($this->stopwords); $i++) {
            $string = str_replace($this->stopwords[$i],' ',$string);
        }

        return trim($string);
    }

    function removeSymbols($string) {
        for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($this->symbols); $i++) {
            $string = str_replace($this->symbols[$i],' ',$string);
        }

        return trim($string);
    }
}

Source : http://stackoverflow.com/a/9082165