PHP function that picks out letters only

[Anon]

Hi,
I was wondering there is a PHP function that will search out letters (any and every letter of the alphabet AND case-insensitive) but NOT numbers (digits)....perhaps, a sort of wildcard(%) but searching only for letters of the alphabet. I thought of using strstr() as a means to search out letters in the variable but with that I would need to write the function out 26 times in order to identify even single letter of the alphabet!!

Thanks in advance to everyone who replies!!!
Allen.

[Anon]

This would work:

$string = "345kldfr24j5h2kn HI@#I&BL&@BLDH)*@#$E";

for ($i=65;$i<=90;$i++) {
if (strstr($string, chr($i))) {
$found[] = chr($i);
}
if (strstr($string, strtolower(chr($i)))) {
$found[] = strtolower(chr($i));
}
}
print "The following letters were found at least once in the string ";
while (list($key,$val) = each ($found)) {
print $val;
}

[Anon]

If you just want to get rid of non-letters, try :

eregi_replace("[^{a-z]","",$s);}

[Anon]

Olivier,
Can I ask a stupid question....what is the ^ symbol (before a-z) for? And actually I want to get rid of letter...NOT non-letters .... but from the expression you gave I think that it does exactly that (get rid of letters and replace them with nothing), am I right?
Allen.

[Anon]

Thanks Louie!! I'll give it a shot.

[Anon]

Louie,
Can I just ask another dumbass question...why is "$i=65;$i<=90"? how did you arrive at the value of 65 and 90 as opposed to say, 0 and 25, respectively?
Thanking in anticipation.
Allen.

[Anon]

The numbers 65 thru 90 represent the letters A - Z in ascii code. So by looping thru those and using chr() you can't recreate the alphabet.

[Anon]

Sorry to answer only now, there are too many messages in this forum ;-)
^ means "NOT", so the function eliminates non-letters. To remove letters, just write [a-z].