ereg_replace wrong replace

kosmidd

Hello everyone.
Here is my quetsion.
This is sypposed to replace the $DELETEPOINTS with $EMPTY.(Some kind of delete)
For some reason it deletes the end of every line ('😉 in conf.php
if (isset($HTTP_POST_VARS["rdel"])){
$EDIT_FILE = "C:\MySites\bookstore\Admin\conf.php";
$file_array = file($EDIT_FILE);
$file = join ("", $file_array);
if ($HTTP_POST_VARS['entry'].checked == true ){
$ArrayNum = $HTTP_POST_VARS['entry'];
}
$EMPTY="";
$DELETEPOINTS = "\$writer .= '$WriterArray[$ArrayNum]|';";
echo"$DELETEPOINTS";
$file = preg_replace("/$DELETEPOINTS/", $EMPTY, $file);

$fp = fopen("$EDIT_FILE", "w");
flock($fp, 1);
fputs($fp, $file);
flock($fp, 3);
fclose($fp);

}
Any ideas?

Anon

You need to escape the '|' character, it has a special meaning in regular expressions.

kosmidd

I replace the | character with ~~~ so there is no problem now for this.
The problem now is that it does nothing.
No replace.
It seems it cannot find the line to replace.
But using echo I see that the script creates the right string to be found.
now what is the problem?

Anon

Try this, the backslash '\' makes the '|' a normal (not special) character:

$DELETEPOINTS = "\$writer .= '$WriterArray[$ArrayNum]|';";

kosmidd

I replaced the '|' with '~~~' so I use this to explode to an array some strings in conf.php file.
The problem was that ereg_replace couldn't replace a string from conf.php.
Instead of ereg_replace I used str_replace and everything worked fine now.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate your help.