strip commas

[cqball2000]

How do I strip commas that may be in front of a string or trailing a string.

For example:

,blah,blah,blah

-or-

blah,blah,blah,

Thanks!~

[reagent]

try this regexp:
$strMy = " ,blah,blah,blah, ";
print preg_replace('/^\s,|,\s$/', '', $strMy);

the \s* will replace any leading or trailing whitespace as well...

hth
p.

[Anon]

Best way I have is with regular expressions.

$string = ",blah,blah,blah";
$string = ereg_replace("(^,|,$)", "", $string);

Now, the first comma is cut of. It would cut off the last comma if there was one there as well. Basically all the regular expression says is this:

(^,|,$)

take out the parentheses and we have

^,|,$

The pipe symbol (|) just means "or". So we have

^, OR ,$

The ^ means match the beginning of the string given to us, and the $ means match the end of the string for us. So...

(Beginning of string), OR ,(End of String)

With ereg_replace, we match either one of those and give it a second argument to replace it with, in this case, "" nothing. And the third argument is, of course, the string we are matching against. Hope that helps!

Chris King

[cqball2000]

Perfect, but what if the string comes in as:

blah,,blah,blah...

I'd want only one comma there instead of two.

Help?!

Thanks 🙂

[reagent]

$strMy = " ,blah,,blah,blah, ";
$strMy = preg_replace('/,+/', ',', $strMy);
print preg_replace('/^{\s,|,{|,\s$/',} '', $strMy);