how to strip specific characters from string?

[aviendha]

I have a form that allows users to enter their phone number with spaces, paren, dot, or hyphen. When I insert the phone number into the db I would like to strip all those characters out. I figure I can use trim() for the spaces. I tried using str_replace() for the others, replacing them with null, but that didn't work.

How can this be done?

[cgraz]

str_replace should work just fine. Check out the code below

$phone = "555-174-3268";

$phone = str_replace("-", "", $phone);
$phone = str_replace(".", "", $phone);
$phone = str_replace(" ", "", $phone);
$phone = str_replace("(", "", $phone);
$phone = str_replace(")", "", $phone);

On the last two with the parenthesis, you may need to escape the parenthesis to avoid parse errors.

Cgraz

[aviendha]

haha - I must be getting tired. I didn't assign the str_replace anywhere (string = str_replace......).

sorry

your code was pretty much what I had without the new variable. Thanks for the heads up on escaping the paren though (and thanks for the quick reply)

[cgraz]

no problem. I've made that mistake in the past 😉

Cgraz