More regex troubles

lucianoes

I'm obviously missing something very important about how regular expressions are supposed to work. I still haven't found answers for my previous questions, BTW. Here is the new problem:

This time I don't want to print anything in a Web page. I just want to pre-process a text file. I have:

bababa
cacaca
dadada
fafafa

I want to remove all line breaks and separate all elements with a '#' symbol, like this:

bababa#cacaca#dadada#fafafa#...

so I apply:
$result1 = preg_replace ("/\r/", "#", $line);

The result, however, is:

bababa#
cacaca#
dadada#
fafafa#

That is \r PLUS a '#' symbol. I want to <u>remove</u> line breaks. What am I doing wrong???

Thanks,
Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil

khaine

a line break is normally \n not \r and wouldn't it be easier to use $result1 = str_replace("\n", "#", $linein);??

Mark.

Anon

or first convert "\r\n" to "\n", because on Windows "\r\n" is normally,"\r" on MAC, and "\n" on Unix.

====
Igor

lucianoes

I haven't tried str_replace() yet, but \n doesn't work. It has to be \r (escaped).

BTW, I got so hooked up on the habit of using preg_replace() because it lets me use delimiters, therefore I can use PCRE modifiers and switch to non-greedy mode. Maybe I can use PCRE modifiers with other functions too, but it doesn't seem to work in my experiments. Regular expressions have been driving me crazy for the past three days. If anyone can spot right away what kind of stupid thinking is leading me astray, please, enlighten me.

I am begging you.

Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil

khaine

You may not need to escape the slash. when you use '\r' preg_replace is looking for the string \r instead of the control code for newline try dropping one of the slashes.

Mark.

lucianoes

Thanks, Igor, \r\n is what I needed.
I still don't understand why I have to escape everything except newlines, but it works.

Thank you all,
Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil