ereg_replace pattern doesn't work

nic0las

Hi,
I'm trying to delete the empty options of a html tag, using ereg_replace.
The problem is that it's removing all the options, even those that are not empty!
Here is the code :

function necho($opt)
{
$opt=ereg_replace(" .*\"\" ", "", $opt);
echo "$opt";
}

necho("<body bgcolor=\"green\" background=\"\" text=\"\" link=\"red\" vlink=\"\" alink=\"red\" leftmargin=\"\" topmargin=\"\" >");

It should return :

"<body bgcolor="green" link="red" alink="red">"

But only write :

"<body>"

Could someone help? Thanks.

tomhath

Your regex will replace everything from the first blank through the last pair of empty quotes. Keep in mind that ".*" matches everything.

This might be closer, but I haven't tested it:

$opt=ereg_replace(" [^\"]+\"\"" , "", $opt);

nic0las

It works, thanks, but could you explain how you managed this, because I don't have a clue how such a regex would do what it does?

netizen

I'm tired right now, but I was wondering why you used an expression to stripslashes?

$variable = stripslashes($variable);

update: I knew I was tired ... 🙂 nevermind.

tomhath

Best book I know of on the topic is "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeff Friedl.

I just takes practice, you have to get used to reading them one character at a time.