Filtering text

[Anon]

Just curious what the best way to remove all none alpha-numeric chars from a string is?

At the moment I am looping through each character and using a complex IF statement to decide whether to append it to the new filtered string. This strikes me as being a pretty dumb way to do things.

Wookie

[polson]

A fairly common way is using ereg_ functions, such as :

$string = eregi_replace('[^{0-9a-z]','',$string);}

Which will make more sense after reading :

http://phpbuilder.com/columns/dario19990616.php3

Essentially it means "replace anything that isn't 0-9 or a-z with '' (nothing) and be case insensitive while doing it."