PHP Regex Pattern Problem

Ziycon

I'm taking two pieces of text and using them to build a file name.

So say I have:

1234 and 'Is this a, test?'

I'm looking to use preg_replace to replace all spaces with a dash and to remove all to remove all non-alphanumeric characters(except dashes).

I have this but I can't seem to get it working, anyone any ideas or help?!

preg_replace("[^a-zA-Z0-9/\s.(/\s+/)*]","-",'1234 Is this a, test?')

seamus

You'll need to do it in two steps really. First step, strip out everything except non-alpha characters and spaces.

$newString = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $oldString);

Then replace all spaces with dashes (the below will replace a series of spaces with a single dash)

$newerString = preg_replace("/\s+/", "-", $newString);

Of course you can combine them into one statement, but it can be quite unreadable.

$newString =  preg_replace("/\s+/", "-", (preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $oldString));

It's useful to get a regex testing utility (there are loads of browser plugins for it) as creating the correct regex is usually the hardest part of this code.

komodosp

This one is handy...

http://regexpal.com/