Stripping characters from strings

[Anon]

I have a whole bunch of characters that I want to remove from a string, at the moment I am using the str_replace function but I am sure there is a much better way of doing it. Perhaps using the preg_replace function...

My current code is :

$varContent = str_replace(",", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace(".", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace(";", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace(":", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("\"", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("(", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace(")", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("'", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("[", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("]", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("{", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("}", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("#", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("+", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("%", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("~", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("  ", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("\n", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("\t", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("\r", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("\s", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("1", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("2", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("3", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("4", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("5", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("6", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("7", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("8", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("9", "", $varContent);
$varContent = str_replace("0", "", $varContent);

Can anyone help????

Thanks

AlexT

[amcgrath]

Try something like this:
$varContent = ereg_replace ("[[:alnum:]]", "", $varContent);

[[deleted]]

Dang, is there anything you do want to keep in the string? looks to me like you just want to keep all letters. am I right?

[Anon]

Pretty much. I'm halfway through writing a search engine and part of that is creating the links for keywords on a submitted page...

Hence, I need to remove any junk, numbers, URLs, mail address and such like from the content string!!!!

[Anon]

Thanks, I'll give it a whirl.