replacing characters in string

Anon

I'm not sure how to do this, I want to take out all characters in a string so that it's just all one word at the end ( so I can take that modified string and check it against a list ). Caps would be nice to if you can do that

Ex:
This string comes from a form
$unmodstring = Text_Full@of"spec"-chars.;

I can then set another variable equal to that to play with
$modstring = $unmodstring;

Then do the code that takes all that out
//I have this part down to strip tags and white spaces
$unmodstring = trim(strip_tags($unmodstring));
//not sure what to do here

The echo output of $modstring would be:
textfullofspecchars

Thanks a lot for all the help...
Donnie

daynah

Does your function strip special characters too? Else you'll have to write another function to strip @, # , $, %,.. etc.

After that, you can take the string and strtolower($unmodstring) This will make it all lowercase.

I hope that helped a little bit.

Anon

the strtolower() helps a lot, I didn't know that. But yes I need to omit all special characters also @, # , $, %,.. etc.

Thanks, that solves half my problem with the lower case deal

rbenfield

This will do what you need. It is the only line you need. It will strip ALL non letter or numeric characters. This includes spaces leading, trailling or in the middle. It will get rid of anything other than a through z or 0 through 9 and is not case sesitive. After that it will convert it all to lowercase. Btw, there is also an strtoupper but then you probably figured that out since learning of the strtolower. Anyway here it is.

$modstring = strtolower(preg_replace( "/[^a-z|0-9]/i", "", $unmodstring));

Hope that helps,
Richard

rbenfield

one thing I didn't think about. If they have tags i.e. <b>sometext<\b> then mine alone would result in "bsometextb" instead of "sometext". so you may want to run the strip_tags first. But you dont need the trim.

rbenfield

bah... I should have know it would do that. I meant <Bold Tag>sometext</Bold Tag> would end up .... you know what I mean...

Anon

You've been a great help, taht is exactly what I wsa looking for..I seen that replace function in the manual but it didn't make much sense. That clears it up a lot, thanks again

Anon

OK, I got all that to work great, but I have another question on the same thing, how do I also look for strings that are almost the same.

I am taking that modified string and checking it against a list

Say the list has "paper, pen, ink" in it
but the modified strings are "papers, pens, inkpens"

That way I don't have to put both the singular and plural instances of every word in the list

rbenfield

You can try this function...

http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.similar-text.php

It returns a percentage of similarity. So you could just say for example, if the percentage returned is higher than 85% or 90% or whatever then do whatever...

Hope that helps,
Richard