regex PHP

Reamer Fanny

I can't get my head around regex can anyone suggest a regex pattern that would remove hyphens, spaces and apostrophes in a string? I am using the preg_replace function I know I can do it with str_replace but I want to try to get the code on one line.

OneIdea

justryan wrote: »

I can't get my head around regex can anyone suggest a regex pattern that would remove hyphens, spaces and apostrophes in a string? I am using the preg_replace function I know I can do it with str_replace but I want to try to get the code on one line.

[PHP]
$str = " Don't try - this at home";

$str = preg_replace("#\'|\s+|-#", "", $str);

echo $str; // Donttrythisathome
[/PHP]

Reamer Fanny

OneIdea wrote: »

[PHP]
$str = " Don't try - this at home";

$str = preg_replace("#\'|\s+|-#", "", $str);

echo $str; // Donttrythisathome
[/PHP]

Genius! It worked

PrzemoF

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/659025/removing-non-alphanumeric-characters-with-php

Tar.Aldarion

Never really did php, why are there #'s at the start and end and why is there a|, for or? Why is there no \ before -?

OneIdea

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

Never really did php, why are there #'s at the start and end and why is there a|, for or? Why is there no \ before -?

Some notes about it here http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.delimiters.php

Other then that, we could have used #'|\s+|-# and not escape the apostrophe, its just a habit of mine...

s+ is the regex for spaces, but we need to escape it or it would just match the letter s

DonkeyStyle \o/

justryan wrote: »

I know I can do it with str_replace but I want to try to get the code on one line.

You can do it in one line with str_replace, just pass in an array.
str_replace(array('something', 'something else'), '', $string)
Still worth learning regex though, you can take it with you to other languages and situations.

Reamer Fanny

DonkeyStyle \o/ wrote: »

You can do it in one line with str_replace, just pass in an array.
str_replace(array('something', 'something else'), '', $string)
Still worth learning regex though, you can take it with you to other languages and situations.

Yep either would work but preg_replace is certainly more elegant