replacing a character

adavis

I have a textarea that I want to search for a single quote and replace that with '. I just can't seem to get a handle on regular expressions. I know this is just basic stuff for most of you.

Thanks

bad_goose

You don't need to use regular expressions for simple replaces like that. Just use str_replace. The following code:

$text = str_replace("'", '&#039;', $text);

will replace all double quotes with single quotes in the string $text. See the php manual for more info.

adavis

Oh well, let me try again...

I want to replace the single quote with & # 0 3 9 ; . I put spaces in between each character so it wouldn't be converted. Right now, when someone enters "wouldn't", I displays back as "wouldn\\'t" which is pretty ugly.

leonleun

try

$text = str_replace('"', '& # 0 3 9 ;', $text);

just remove the spaces...

you may also want to check out the stripslashes() function in the php manual

adavis

Do I need to escape the ' as in:

$text = str_replace('\'', '&039;', $text);

??? without the \, I my editor acts like I haven't entered the ?> when I have.

Okay well, I just previewed this response and it doesn't show the \ I put in before the middle ' in the first part of the argument, so I'll try it and see what happens.

Thanks

adavis

Here's what worked...

$str= str_replace("\'", "& #039;", $str);

Thanks for the help 🙂

devinemke

you don't need str_replace nor regular expressions for this. look at stripslashes() and htmlspecialchars().

I always run my form submitted data thru a cleanup function to handle these sort of problems. for example:

function cleanup ()
{
foreach ($POST as $key => $value)
{
$value = strip_tags ($value);
$value = stripslashes ($value);
$value = htmlspecialchars ($value);
$value = trim ($value);
$POST[$key] = $value;
}
}

then I run cleanup() before displaying the form data. Just be careful when inserting data into a database, you will need those slashes.