find a string of words in a paragraph

juschillinnow

I have a string in a database like this:

OUT OF STOCK miniatures Golden Hair Cherub Collection 3" 4 asst, price is for the dozen

and others like this:

GONE miniatures Golden Hair Cherub Collection 3" 4 asst, price is for the dozen

I want to replace the first part from both of them so it just reads:

miniatures Golden Hair Cherub Collection 3" 4 asst, price is for the dozen

and update the database with that. I have tried the following:

$query = "select * from storeProduct where productID = '$name'";
$mysql_result = mysql_query($query, $mysql_link);
$row = mysql_fetch_row($mysql_result);
$cut = ereg_replace("<br><font size=\"4\" color=\"#FF0000\">OUT OF STOCK</font><br> ", "", $row[3]);

//This is inside of a while statement so it will come back around again and I want to pull out the ones that have 'GONE' in them as well and update the database accordingly.
//it works fine except for when I try to do both I was trying it like this:

//$cut = ereg_replace("<br><font size=\"4\" color=\"#FF0000\">GONE</font><br> ", "", $row[3]);
//and hoping that $cut the second time would pick up the ones that the first $cut didn't.  Doesn't quite work like this.

$update = "update storeProduct set productDescription = '$cut' where productID = '$name'";
$update_result = mysql_query($update, $mysql_link);

juschillinnow

anybody know how to do this?

Let me know if you don't understand

merkinmuffley

you're on the right track, you just need to refine the regular expression a little. I prefer using the PCRE functions so I'm going to point you in that direction... the manual page for preg_replace has an example that I think will help you, you can find it here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

the example is for converting HTML to text, replacing blocks of script surrounded by <script> and </script> tags and so forth. but the general idea works in your case too; just use instead of <script>.