Multiple preg_replace

Anon

I have a bunch of words i am not allowing users to use when posting things to my site - is there a better way to replace them than multiple preg_replace?

Meaning, I want to block for example: chair, table, dining

I don\'t really want to do:

preg_replace (\'chair\',\'**\',$string);
preg_replace (\'table\',\'\',$string);
preg_replace (\'dining\',\'***\',$string);

Thanks for all help

Regards

Darren

Anon

That should be the best way to do it.

Anon

Read the manual page again. You'll notice that every argument to preg_replace can be an array. There you will find the key to a more economical expression.

Anon

Hi Steve

Thanks for the reply...I tried the following:

$test = 'this is the piece1 of text i am trying to change piece2';

$pizza = array('piece1','piece2','piece3','piece4','piece5','piece6');

$test = preg_replace($pizza,'****',$test);

echo $test;

But, I get 6 lines of:

Warning: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash in /home/darren/www/docs/test.html on line 6

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

Darren

Anon

That's because preg_replace wants those funky Perl-style regular expressions:

$pizza =
array('/piece1/','/piece2/','/piece3/','/piece4/','/piece5/','/piece6/');

You also could do this with ereg_replace, without arrays, and without the funky slashes. Keep in mind that the pipe character means "or" to the regex engine:

Anon

Please keep in mind that all of the proposed solutions will also find these "words" even when they appear as a substring of a larger word. preg has some magic sequence for word-boundary, doesn't it?

Anon

That's interesting - I have solutions now for bith eregi_replace and preg_replace - does preg 'just' find the whole word or does that do substrings too?

Also, is preg case insensitive? is there a pregi_replace function.

Thanks for your help everyone.