Give me remove special characters from a string, plz

superthin · 07-20-2009, 03:08 AM

Hello everybody,

I am a newbie. I want to remove all special characters from a string (keep alpha-numeric character only). And replace a space (or many spaces) with "-" character.

Code:

Ex: This is bullshit M$ Word. They make   me 100% crazy.
Will be: This-is-bullshit-M-Word-They-make-me-100-crazy

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
SuperThin.

Village Idiot · 07-20-2009, 03:19 AM

This should do it

PHP Code:


			
// To strip special chars
preg_replace("[!-@]","",$subject);

//To make all spaces -
str_replace(" ","-",$subject);

//Take any sequince of two or more -s and make them one.
preg_replace("[-]{2,}","-",$subject);

I wrote this off the top of my head, so I can't guarantee that its perfect.

Salathe · 07-20-2009, 11:13 AM

You could also use a single call to preg_replace with multiple patterns/replacements.

PHP Code:


			
$subject = 'This is bullshit M$ Word. They make   me 100% crazy.';
$search  = array('/[^a-z0-9 ]+/i', '/ +/');
$replace = array('', '-');
echo preg_replace($search, $replace, $subject);
// Output: This-is-bullshit-M-Word-They-make-me-100-crazy

superthin · 07-29-2009, 12:51 AM

Wow, thank you(s) very much. Now, I want to "Do not replace . (point) / Point is not a special character". What should I do? It seems to very hard to grasp Regular Expression for beginners.

Salathe · 07-29-2009, 10:04 AM

Just change [^a-z0-9 ] in my previous post to [^a-z0-9. ]. Simples.

As for learning regular expressions, if you haven't already then please bookmark and visit http://www.regular-expressions.info/ as it is the best concise online source of information about regular expressions that I've found so far.